Covid-19 investigators turn focus onto Chinese wildlife farms
- A member of the WHO team that visited Wuhan says the city’s Huanan market sold products that had come from areas where virus-carrying bats live
- Food safety expert Hung Nguyen-Viet says this potential pathway for the virus needs to be properly investigated
Research into wildlife farms in southern China will be a critical next step in the search for the origins of Covid-19, a member of the WHO investigation team has said.
Biologist and food safety and disease expert Hung Nguyen-Viet was one of the 10 international scientists who took part in the 28-day mission to Wuhan to understand how the virus began spreading in humans before it was identified in that city in late 2019.
The team’s findings, a joint report with Chinese scientists, have come under scrutiny after they were published on Tuesday, with World Health Organization director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus saying the team did not have full, timely access to data.
Nguyen-Viet, who is Vietnamese but based in Nairobi where he co-leads the animal and human health programme at the International Livestock Research Institute, said the international interest around the research was like nothing he had experienced in this career.
“We were aware that we conducted this mission amid political sensitivities, but we focused on the research, on the mission purpose and the work we were asked to do,” he said.
As for whether there were restrictions on access to data during the mission, Nguyen-Viet said some data was still being compiled and processed.
“It’s an evolving process and that is understandable,” he said.