WHO team to probe source of virus arrives in Wuhan
Print Edition
A PANEL of World Health Organization scientists arrived in the central Chinese city of Wuhan yesterday to cooperate with their Chinese peers in the research of the potential source of the coronavirus.
The WHO team underwent both throat swabs and serum antibody tests at the airport, and is expected to head into two weeks of quarantine in China. They are to start working with Chinese experts via video conference while in quarantine.
Two members of the team remained behind in Singapore after testing positive for coronavirus antibodies, the global body said.
The team of 15 had all tested negative for the disease prior to leaving their home countries, and underwent further testing while in transit in Singapore.
The results of nucleic acid tests were negative but showed two of the members had coronavirus antibodies, the Geneva-based agency said in a tweet. “They are being retested for both IgM and IgG antibodies,” the WHO said.
“Relevant epidemic prevention and control requirements and regulations will be strictly enforced,” Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said yesterday in response to a question about the two team members.
The group left the airport terminal in Wuhan through a plastic quarantine tunnel marked “epidemic prevention passage” for international arrivals and boarded a cordoned-off bus that was guarded by security staff in full protective gear.
The team includes virus and other experts from the United States, Australia, Germany, Japan, Britain, Russia, the Netherlands, Qatar and Vietnam. Peter Ben Embarek, the WHO’s top expert on animal diseases that cross to other species, who went to China on a preliminary mission last July, was leading the team going to Wuhan, a WHO spokesman said previously.
Hung Nguyen, a Vietnamese biologist who was part of the team, said that the team will spend two weeks interviewing people from research institutes, hospitals and the seafood market which was linked to some of the first reported cases.
“We are looking for the answers here that may save us in future — not culprits and not people to blame,” the WHO’s top emergency expert, Mike Ryan, told reporters this week, adding that the WHO was willing to go “anywhere and everywhere” to find out how the virus emerged.
This is the third such visit since the start of the pandemic. China had invited WHO experts twice, in February and July last year, to trace potential sources in China.
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