African swine fever ‘may have sparked Covid pandemic as pork shortage forced Chinese people to eat more exotic animals’

DEADLY African swine fever could have been the catalyst for the global Covid pandemic as a shortage of pork forced Chinese people to eat more exotic animals, says a new study.

An outbreak of the pig disease in China two years ago and the dramatic drop in the supply of pork accelerated demand for other meat sources – including wildlife – say researchers.

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An outbreak of swine flu in China could have been the catalyst for the Covid pandemic[/caption]

“If more wildlife enters the human food chain, either through [individuals] hunting … or going to market and getting different meat sources. If that increases, it could just increase the contact opportunity,” said David Robertson, professor of viral genomics and bioinformatics at Glasgow University.

“You’re just increasing the opportunity for the [Sars-CoV-2] virus to get into humans.”

Pork is the main meat eaten in the Chinese diet, and the country produces half of the world’s pigs, equating to around 55 million tonnes of pork annually, reported The Guardian.

After the African swine flu outbreak had spread across most of China by the fourth quarter of 2019, there were more chances for human-coronavirus contact through other animals, suggest the Glasgow University researchers from China and the UK in a yet to be peer-reviewed analysis.

Although the first group of Covid-19 cases was detected in Wuhan, it is possible the disease started elsewhere.

Theories for just where and when Covid started are wide-ranging and include the high security Wuhan Institute of Virology, which has been specialising in bat-borne viruses since 2015.

A team of World Health Organization investigators also probed the possibility the virus had started at the Huanan Seafood Market, where the first cases were detected.

The theory that the virus could have even been imported in frozen Australian beef was also mooted, as the WHO’s controversial findings after a month-long investigation were thrown into chaos.

Of a sample of 41 early confirmed cases of Covid-19, two thirds of those infected were stall owners, employees or regular customers of the Huanan market, which sold seafood but also live animals.

The newly published analysis notes that African swine flu could have caused a shortage of around 40-60 per cent of China’s total pig population, causing chaos in the country’s meat industry.

“And so that potentially explains why there’s no direct connection [to the market in previous research], why we’re finding it hard to find the connection,” said Professor Robertson.

“Because with that kind of a spillover, you would go to the market and you would expect to find infected animals still – and that’s not happened. And so, there is a puzzle, there’s a sort of a missing link.”

The hypothesis that African swine flu could have caused the Covid crisis need to be “considered”, added Professor Robertson.

“We’re showing disruption … imagine a wall, it’s just a brick in that wall of evidence. It’s something that we think should be considered in the understanding of what unfolded.

“As is often the case in these kinds of investigations – it can take many years to disentangle the probable routes.

“[While] it is unlikely we’ll ever know exactly what happened – it does seem likely that we will find a virus close to Sars-CoV-2 from a bat, [or] maybe another species.

“And then from that, you can start to say, well, how did that get into humans?”