The World Health Organization (WHO) this Friday appealed to China for a second time to share all scientific information useful in determining the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic, after learning that it has genetic and molecular results that are protected about the animal. The market, which was the first place he was suspected.
tion from China’s Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC) was uploaded to an open access science platform and discovered by European experts who analyzed it and reported their findings to the WHO, but since then all of the data has been available. removed from the platform.
Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that as soon as it became aware of it, the World Health Organization asked the Chinese authorities for access to the information, adding that the data did not allow for definitive conclusions about how the pandemic started. But “all these data are important in approaching the answer.”
How did the question begin? [la pandemia] This continues unanswered”, said the head of the World Health Organization at the press conference of the UN agency. March 11 marked three years since the WHO first described the global spread of COVID-19 as a pandemic.
“This data could have been shared three years ago”
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus elaborated that last week, the World Health Organization “was aware of some of the data published in the GISAID database at the end of January and has recently withdrawn it again”. “The data, from China’s Centers for Disease Prevention and Control, refers to samples taken from Wuhan’s Huanan market in 2020,” he said.
“While they were online, scientists from different countries downloaded the data and analyzed it. As soon as we became aware of these data, we contacted the Chinese CDC and urged them to share them with WHO and the international scientific community for analysis,” he continued, explaining that a scientific advisory group had also been assembled. for the Origin of Novel Pathogens (SAGO), which met on Tuesday. “We asked the Chinese CDC researchers and an international team of scientists to provide an analysis of the data for SAGO.”
“All data related to research into the origins of COVID-19 must be shared with the international community immediately. These data could and should have been shared three years ago,” said the head of WHO. “We continue to call on China to be transparent when it comes to data sharing, conduct the necessary investigations and share the results.” Understanding how the COVID pandemic began remains both a moral and a scientific imperative. ”
this thursday New York Times It was announced that an international group of virus experts had found it Genetic data from a Wuhan market linking the coronavirus to raccoon dogs sold there. Genetic data has been extracted from swabs taken in and around the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market since January 2020, after Chinese authorities shut down the market over suspicions it was linked to the outbreak of the new virus, the US newspaper reported.
So far, indirect information that WHO has received is consistent with genetic and molecular tests of samples collected from a food and animal market in Wuhan in January 2020 that tested positive for the SARS-CoV-2 virus. “However, the virus has not been detected in animals or animal samples on the market, nor in animals that have infected humans,” said Maria van Herkov, WHO’s pandemic response technical manager. by EFE.
“We have directly requested the Chinese CDC to make this information available to the international community. Any information that’s out there, any data that’s out there, whether it’s from China or any other country, should be shared,” he said. The epidemiologist emphasized that there remain different hypotheses about the origin of the coronavirus, which has caused almost seven million deaths, 5,000 of them in the last week alone. “The part of information that we don’t have before is, for example, where the animals came from, which farm. We are also asking for serological analysis from people who worked in the market or the farms where the animals came from, but these are all questions that have not been answered,” Van Kherkov said.
Source: El Diario
