Coronavirus ‘hitching a ride on food’ to spread around world, Singapore scientist says
- While it remains a ‘freakish’ event, the global food trade’s scale means transmission will occur, said infectious disease specialist Dale Fisher
- The theory has been played down by the World Health Organization and some Western nations – though China has been vocal about it for months
It is possible that contaminated food imports can transfer the virus to workers as well as the environment, said Dale Fisher, an infectious diseases doctor at Singapore’s National University Hospital. Frozen-food markets are thought to be one harbour in the first part of a chain of transmission, he added.
“It’s hitching a ride on the food, infecting the first person that opens the box,” Fisher, who also chairs the Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network, said in an interview. “It’s not to be confused with supermarket shelves getting infected. It’s really at the marketplace, before there’s been a lot of dilution.”
A lot of people may be against this because they don’t want to scare the world – the food could be a source
While such transmission remains a “freakish” event, the scale of the global food trade is such that it will occur a few times out of millions of imports and exports, said Fisher.