Speaker 1: Welcome to Prognosis. I'm Laura Carlson. It's day two d
Speaker 1: and nine since coronavirus was declared a global pandemic. Today
Speaker 1: we're bringing you a special episode. Scientists have long believed
Speaker 1: the source of a pandemic can be traced back to bats.
Speaker 1: Pioneering research by Australian veterinarian Dr Hume Field more than
Speaker 1: twenty years ago showed why bats are an important host
Speaker 1: of some of humanity's most feared viruses. Bloomberg Senior editor
Speaker 1: Jason Gale recently caught up with Hume to hear more
Speaker 1: about how the stars COVIE two virus got from bats
Speaker 1: two people. It's been a year since COVID nineteen emerged
Speaker 1: in the central Chinese city of Wuhan. A lot is
Speaker 1: being learned in that time, but Hume says questions still
Speaker 1: remain about the coronavirus origins. What we don't have is
Speaker 1: it really is much more information about where it's come from.
Speaker 1: And understandably, all the focus has been on getting the
Speaker 1: diagnostics up, getting the human treatment protocols up, but we
Speaker 1: still don't have much information, at least published, about where
Speaker 1: this virus may have come from. Humor is part of
Speaker 1: an international task force set up by the Lancet Medical Journal.
Speaker 1: He says at least two things have frustrated the research efforts,
Speaker 1: international travel restrictions and politics. One of the unfortunate things,
Speaker 1: and part of it is the circumstance of COVID ninety
Speaker 1: disease and the inability to travel and shutdowns and stuff
Speaker 1: like that, is that that investigation hasn't been able to
Speaker 1: be a collaborative investigation. It hasn't been able to be
Speaker 1: an international, um multi institutional kind of global investigation. And
Speaker 1: as I said, that's in part because of the constraints
Speaker 1: of the infectivity of the virus, but it's in part
Speaker 1: alls so because of the what I think is a
Speaker 1: tragic politicization of the science around this. Humors helped investigate
Speaker 1: several international disease outbreaks, including the origins of Stars almost
Speaker 1: twenty years ago. Back then, a team that included Chinese, American,
Speaker 1: and Australian scientists work together to trace the virus to bats,
Speaker 1: and the result was a collaborative and joint body of
Speaker 1: work and knowledge that was shared and was um you know,
Speaker 1: accepted in the scientific community. The problem we have with
Speaker 1: this politicization of science and almost you know, the conspiracy
Speaker 1: fairest thing is that the Chinese scientists might well be
Speaker 1: able to get to the to the bottom of this,
Speaker 1: and may well have a very plausible identification of both
Speaker 1: a natural reservoir and a pathway, a conjute, if you like,
Speaker 1: an epidemiological bridge to human spillover the ongoing challenges, how
Speaker 1: do we how do we make any findings that Chinese
Speaker 1: scientists may already have in this area, and any additional
Speaker 1: findings that we make, how do we make those broadly
Speaker 1: accepted to what now seems to be quite a cynical
Speaker 1: and politicized audience in some sectors of him says, the
Speaker 1: only way to have the Task Force investigators and their
Speaker 1: results accepted as being legitimate and credible is if they
Speaker 1: consider all hypotheses the laws. They need to back up
Speaker 1: their theories with strong evidence. So we've got, you know,
Speaker 1: something like half a dozen hypotheses that start with some
Speaker 1: version of a bad human transmission, so it might be
Speaker 1: about human director then goes and spread it somewhere else,
Speaker 1: or it might be a bad intermediate and etcetera, etcetera.
Speaker 1: So there are several versions of that poten actual scenario,
Speaker 1: right down to you know some of the evidently you
Speaker 1: know less well based conspiracy type approaches about releases and
Speaker 1: labor scapes. There are about a dozen people on the team.
Speaker 1: Kim says that once they've gone over the evidence, they
Speaker 1: were trying to identify it the most plausible scenario for
Speaker 1: how the virus entered humans and became efficient at spreading
Speaker 1: from person to person. This is really about understanding what happened.
Speaker 1: He are firstly to do that, to understand what happened
Speaker 1: here in this context of sas Kobe two and the
Speaker 1: resulting COVID nineteen, but certainly to understand what that pathway
Speaker 1: is so we can mitigate it being used again, if
Speaker 1: you like, by a subject of emerging disease. Him says,
Speaker 1: scientific thinking around the new coronavirus has changed over the
Speaker 1: past year. Cases were initially linked to a giant indoor
Speaker 1: fresh produce market in Central war Hunt. I just thought
Speaker 1: the transmission to humans could have come from the animals
Speaker 1: on sale. Then there's president for this. The original SARS
Speaker 1: virus in two thousand and two was linked to one
Speaker 1: of these sites in the southern province of Guangdong. The
Speaker 1: original reports and the association with the wet market and
Speaker 1: the parallels of their parent parallels with sas kov One,
Speaker 1: I think did shape the original perceptions and the original thinking.
Speaker 1: More and more people from an epidemiological perspective, including me,
Speaker 1: are thinking that what we've seen come out over you know,
Speaker 1: these last nine months in terms of additional info, even
Speaker 1: though would have been sort of jigsaw piece size stuff
Speaker 1: with publications, etcetera, does suggest that that one market event
Speaker 1: may have been more likely an amplification or at least
Speaker 1: an increase in the efficiency of the virus in human
Speaker 1: to human transmission. The earliest known COVID nineteen cases in
Speaker 1: Uhan were not linked to the market. This means it's
Speaker 1: possible the virus began infecting humans elsewhere. Jim says it's
Speaker 1: likely that transmission occurred several times before the virus eventually
Speaker 1: sparked a global pandemic, As often happens with these emerging diseases.
Speaker 1: You know, it doesn't necessarily taken. In fact, it typically
Speaker 1: doesn't take the first time and become very efficient human
Speaker 1: to human transmission. You might get one person sick, and
Speaker 1: you might get one generation of transfer one person or
Speaker 1: another and it dies out, etcetera. Etcetera. As we better
Speaker 1: understand that geographic occurrence and the temple account of the
Speaker 1: earlier cases will clarify that aspect. Scientists think that the
Speaker 1: virus came from horseshy bats, but they're not the only
Speaker 1: animals they can spread it. In Europe and more recently
Speaker 1: in the United States, it's become clear that mink are
Speaker 1: highly susceptible to sasko its who This has led to
Speaker 1: mass cullings of these animals on pelt farms. The mink scenario,
Speaker 1: to me, says, where you've got a large population of
Speaker 1: susceptible animals in the right conditions, with a certain density,
Speaker 1: then this virus is just going to go right through it.
Speaker 1: And I also think that gives us some insight into
Speaker 1: where we need to be going, how we need to
Speaker 1: be shaping our investigations of the origins of this virus.
Speaker 1: Him says, they'll need to test wild animals and those
Speaker 1: raised in captivity for coronavirus antibodies for clues. We need
Speaker 1: to be identifying potential plausible populations with some kind of
Speaker 1: trace back if we can from what the earlier cases
Speaker 1: might have had contact with. I've already got some clues
Speaker 1: about the species and locations where related bats or bats
Speaker 1: with related coronaviruses are, and potentially also at the intermediate
Speaker 1: post level. Given the viruses affinity for mink, him says
Speaker 1: it makes sense to screen similar animals like ferrets and weasels.
Speaker 1: The results might fill in some gaps and help us
Speaker 1: understand the coronavirus is mysterious journey from bats to humans.
Speaker 1: And that was Jason Gale in conversation with Hume Field.
Speaker 1: And that's it for our show today. For coverage of
Speaker 1: the outbreak from one barrows around the world, visit Bloomberg
Speaker 1: dot com slash coronavirus and if you like the show,
Speaker 1: please leave us a review and a rating on Apple
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Speaker 1: listeners find our global reporting. The Prognosis Daily Edition is
Speaker 1: produced by Tophah foreheads Jordan Gospore, Magnus Henriksen and me
Speaker 1: Laura Carlson. Original music by Leo Sidrian. Our editors are
Speaker 1: Rick Shine and Francesco Levi. Francesco Levi is Bloomberg's head
Speaker 1: of Podcasts. Thanks for listening.