Business Standard

WHO team visits Wuhan food market in search of virus clues

- AP/PTI 31 January

World Health Organizati­on (WHO) experts, probing the origins of the Covid-19, on Sunday visited the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan, where the deadly coronaviru­s was presumably transmitte­d from animals to humans in the late 2019 and spiralled into a pandemic.

“Very important site visits today — a wholesale market first & Huanan Seafood Market just now. Very informativ­e & critical for our joint teams to understand the epidemiolo­gy of Covid as it started to spread at the end of 2019,” Peter Daszak, a zoologist with the US group Ecohealth Alliance and a member of the WHO team, tweeted on Sunday.

Though the market remained shut and cleaned up after the coronaviru­s cases surfaced in Wuhan in December 2019, the visit is still important to get a feel of what flow of goods, people were, Daszak was quoted by CBS news network.

The visit which took place amid tight security assumed significan­ce as the market was widely presumed to be the source of the virus though Chinese official media in recent months questioned the premise.

While permitting the 14member WHO team of internatio­nal scientists to study the

origin in Wuhan after considerab­le delay and controvers­y, China claims that the virus has emerged from various places in the world while it was the first to report it.

Although the Huanan seafood

market has been sealed off, experts believe that there is still plenty to see and experience there.

"(We hope to) understand the setting, see the places where cases were linked, reconstruc­t the initial event there, search for records of animals, products traded there. And possibly talk to some of the merchants who were there at that time," Peter Ben Embarek, who leads the WHO team, told the state-run Global Times.

After the visit to Huanan Seafood Market, it is to be seen whether the internatio­nal team would be permitted to visit the controvers­ial Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), where former US President Donald Trump alleged that the virus might have escaped into the open.

The itinerary of the WHO team has not yet been announced. They were expected to be in Wuhan for about a month.

Earlier the team of internatio­nal experts, which was constitute­d by the World Health Assembly (WHA), the governing body of the WHO to probe the origins of the virus, had exchanges with medical workers and early COVID-19 cases in Wuhan, China's National Health Commission said on Sunday.

The team visited several places, including Hubei Provincial Hospital of Integrated Chinese and Western Medicine and Wuhan Jinyintan Hospital, where some of the earliest patients in Wuhan were treated, said Mi Feng, commission spokesman, was quoted as saying by the official

 ?? PHOTO:AP ?? A worker from the WHO convoy disinfects a vehicle in the Baishazhou wholesale market in Wuhan
PHOTO:AP A worker from the WHO convoy disinfects a vehicle in the Baishazhou wholesale market in Wuhan

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