pangolins are taking the blame for covid-19

as the number of the novel coronavirus cases continue to rise (or, covid-19, as the world health organization officially named it today), researchers are working feverishly to find the origin of the zoonotic disease. the latest candidate: a little-known scaly animal known as the pangolin.also grimly known as the world’s most illegally trafficked animal, the pangolin is scaly mammal that looks like an armadillo, feasts on ants and termites like an anteater, and is most closely related to cats, dogs, and bears. pangolins are especially prized for its use in traditional medicine, especially in china and vietnam. chinese law currently prohibits the sale of pangolins, and people involved in its trade can be imprisoned for up to 10 years, including fines. however, all eight species of the pangolin have still been hunted for their meat, organs, and scales — to the point that its population has been threatened to extinction in all its natural habitats in asia and africa.this week, researchers from south china agricultural university say they’ve found the genome sequence of a novel coronavirus strain in pangolins is 99 per cent identical to the covid-19 strain in infected people, which suggests the pangolins may be an intermediary animal host of the virus. this was reported in xinhua net, china’s official state-run press agency.

‘a biological plausibility’

but we shouldn’t be so quick to blame the poor pangolin. after all, we are still waiting on the genome sequence and the research paper. researchers are simply highlighting pangolins as a plausible potential carrier.still, it’s not the first time that the pangolin has been linked to the coronavirus. another paper was published in october 2019 identifying the coronavirus in the malaysian pangolin, but it only studied dead animals, and didn’t determine whether the coronavirus was the cause of death. the findings were also done on older samples of pangolins with the results published more than two months before the first case of covid-19 was diagnosed in a human.based on the prior publication that showed coronavirus found in the malay pangolin, there is a biological plausibility, said dr. tara smith, an infectious diseases epidemiologist and professor at ohio’s kent state university college of public health. however, there is still a lot of missing data.“we really need the details. how closely related are these viruses to the novel coronavirus, how were the pangolins sampled, where were they taken from,” said dr. smith.the sars epidemic also had an intermediate animal: the civet cat, which allowed the virus to move from bats before moving to humans. a few years later, dromedary (one-humped) camels were presented as a possible intermediary source of mers between bats and humans. though the mers coronavirus has been found in camels, it has not been confirmed.it’s possible that covid-19 may have several intermediate hosts. although both are nocturnal mammals, bats and pangolins live in different environments, reports the south china morning post.snakes have also been implicated in the spread of  covid-19, but this has since been discredited.the number of people diagnosed with covid-19 has surpassed 43,000, with nearly 99 per cent of the people affected living in mainland china and the vast majority of deaths in hubei province, where the virus was first found.