China’s exotic farms may be a missing link behind the pandemic’s leap to people
Farms supplying live civets, snakes, and bamboo rats may be where the virus jumped between species.
Now, a World Health Organization (WHO) team is considering if wildlife farms may be a missing link that helped the coronavirus jump from its probable host animals—bats—to humans at Wuhan's Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, a site connected to a cluster of the earliest human infections. (The team is also investigating possible links to another market in Wuhan that was tied to an early patient with no connection to Huanan.)
Peter Daszak, a British disease ecologist at the U.S.-based EcoHealth Alliance and member of the WHO delegation that traveled to China to investigate the origins of the pandemic in January 2021, told NPR last week that the WHO team found new evidence indicating that
