A review of COVID-19 studies reveals a troubling connection between two health crises: coronavirus and obesity.
From COVID-19 risk to recovery, the odds are stacked against those with obesity, and a new study led by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill raises concerns about the impact of obesity on the effectiveness of a future COVID-19 vaccine.
Researchers examined the available published literature on individuals infected with the virus and found that those with obesity (BMI over 30) were at a greatly increased risk for hospitalization (113%), more likely to be admitted to the intensive care unit (74%), and had a higher risk of death (48%) from the virus.
A team of researchers at UNC-Chapel Hills Gillings School of Global Public Health, including lead author Barry Popkin, a professor in the Department of Nutrition and member of the Carolina Population Center, collaborated with senior author Meera Shekar, a World Bank health and nutrition specialist, on the paper published in Obesity Reviews.
For the paper, researchers reviewed immunological and biomedical data to provide a detailed layout of the mechanisms and pathways that link obesity with increased risk of COVID-19 as well as an increased likelihood of developing more severe complications from the virus.
Obesity is already associated with numerous underlying risk factors for COVID-19, including hypertension, heart disease, Type 2 diabetes, and chronic kidney and liver disease.
Metabolic changes caused by obesity such as insulin resistance and inflammation make it difficult for individuals with obesity to fight some infections, a trend that can be seen in other infectious diseases, such as influenza and hepatitis.
During times of infection, uncontrolled serum glucose, which is common in individuals with hyperglycemia, can impair immune cell function.
All of these factors can influence immune cell metabolism, which determines how bodies respond to pathogens, like the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, said co-author Melinda Beck, professor of nutrition at Gillings School of Global Public Health. Individuals with obesity are also more likely to experience physical ailments that make fighting this disease harder, such as sleep apnea, which increases pulmonary hypertension, or a body mass index that increases difficulties in a hospital setting with intubation.
Previous work by Beck and others has demonstrated that the influenza vaccine is less effective in adults with obesity. The same may be true for a future SARS-CoV-2 vaccine, said Beck.
However, we are not saying that the vaccine will be ineffective in populations with obesity, but rather that obesity should be considered as a modifying factor to be considered for vaccine testing, she said. Even a less protective vaccine will still offer some level of immunity.
Roughly 40% of Americans are obese and the pandemics resulting lockdown has led to a number of conditions that make it harder for individuals to achieve or sustain a healthy weight.
Working from home, limiting social visits and a reduction in everyday activities all in an effort to stop the spread of the virus means were moving less than ever, said Popkin.
The ability to access healthy foods has also taken a hit. Economic hardships put those who are already food insecure at further risk, making them more vulnerable to conditions that can arise from consuming unhealthy foods.
Were not only at home more and experience more stress due to the pandemic, but were also not visiting the grocery store as often, which means the demand for highly processed junk foods and sugary beverages that are less expensive and more shelf-stable has increased, he said. These cheap, highly processed foods are high in sugar, sodium and saturated fat and laden with highly refined carbohydrates, which all increase the risk of not only excess weight gain but also key noncommunicable diseases.
Popkin, who is part of the Global Food Research Program at UNC-Chapel Hill, said the findings highlight why governments must address the underlying dietary contributors to obesity and implement strong public health policies proven to reduce obesity at a population level. Other countries, like Chile and Mexico, have adopted policies from taxing foods high in sugar to introducing warning labels on packaged foods that are high in sugar, fats and sodium and restricting the marketing of junk foods to children.
Given the significant threat COVID-19 represents to individuals with obesity, healthy food policies can play a supportive and especially important role in the mitigation of COVID-19 mortality and morbidity, Popkin said.
TheWest Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources (DHHR) reports as of 10:00 a.m., on August 25,2020, there have been 403,394 total confirmatorylaboratory results received for COVID-19, with 9,395 totalcases and 187 deaths.
DHHR has confirmed the deaths of a65-year old male from Logan County, a72-year old female from Logan County, a 72-year old female from Logan County, an86-year old female from Taylor County, a 73-year old female from Wyoming County,a 92-year old female from Grant County, a 64-year old female from KanawhaCounty, and a 51-year old female from Cabell County. Pleasejoin with me in sending our deepest condolences to these families as they grievethe passing of their loved ones, said DHHR Cabinet Secretary Bill J. Crouch. Every life lost to this pandemic is atragedy.
CASESPER COUNTY: Barbour (33), Berkeley (769), Boone(130), Braxton (9), Brooke (85), Cabell (493), Calhoun (8), Clay (19),Doddridge (6), Fayette (188), Gilmer (18), Grant (134), Greenbrier (98),Hampshire (92), Hancock (118), Hardy (66), Harrison (258), Jackson (192),Jefferson (328), Kanawha (1,246), Lewis (32), Lincoln (111), Logan (446),Marion (211), Marshall (134), Mason (86), McDowell (66), Mercer (276), Mineral(131), Mingo (219), Monongalia (1,059), Monroe (79), Morgan (37), Nicholas(44), Ohio (289), Pendleton (48), Pleasants (14), Pocahontas (42), Preston(136), Putnam (252), Raleigh (328), Randolph (221), Ritchie (3), Roane (25),Summers (18), Taylor (100), Tucker (11), Tyler (15), Upshur (40), Wayne (230),Webster (7), Wetzel (45), Wirt (7), Wood (292), Wyoming (51).
Pleasenote that delays may be experienced with the reporting of information from thelocal health department to DHHR. As case surveillance continues at the localhealth department level, it may reveal that those tested in a certain countymay not be a resident of that county, or even the state as an individual inquestion may have crossed the state border to be tested.Such is the case of Lincoln,Marshall, Monongalia, and Taylor counties in this report.
Pleasevisit the dashboard located at www.coronavirus.wv.gov for more information.
President Trump has made every aspect of his response to Covid-19 political, from his resistance to mask-wearing to his insistence on reopening schools to his sparring with Democratic governors over lifesaving tests and personal protective equipment.
His administration has even been accused of scrapping a nationwide testing plan after a team convened by Trumps son-in-law Jared Kushner determined that the epidemic would hit blue states the hardest and Democratic governors could be blamed for it.
Now, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) is calling for an investigation of Trumps politicization of the virus and the unnecessary death and damage it may have caused. In a letter sent on Tuesday and obtained by Vox exclusively ahead of publication, Warren and Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Edward Markey (D-MA) write that President Trump and his advisors have repeatedly put their partisan political interests ahead of the health and welfare of the American people.
They detail a host of allegations, including reports that Trump pressured the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to weaken its recommended restrictions for reopening churches, and that he agreed to pay for National Guard troops in only two states, Florida and Texas, because their governors made special, direct cases to the President.
Echoing a call that Warren, Blumenthal, and Markey first made in April, the senators ask the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee (PRAC), an oversight body created by the CARES Act, to investigate the Trump administrations conduct.
Its unclear whether the PRAC will take up such an investigation or what effect it would have the committee has not responded publicly to the senators April letter. And Trump has already intervened in the operations of the group, removing its leader in April after citing nonspecific reports of bias.
Still, the senators letter adds to the chorus of voices charging that the president has turned a national crisis into an opportunity for political gain, effectively leaving tens of thousands of Americans to die.
Americans are seeking trustworthy, objective information and leadership to help them navigate this unprecedented crisis, but the administrations repeated prioritization of President Trumps political interests calls into question the integrity of every action of the federal government, they write. It will be impossible to develop an effective federal response until this partisan interference is addressed and public trust can be restored.
In addition to a call for an investigation, the letter by Warren and colleagues also serves as a public indictment of the presidents Covid-19 response, during which he has admitted to punishing those he sees as critical of him. These are just some of the ways the senators say the president has put politics ahead of American lives:
Its not clear whether the letter will actually lead to an investigation. Established under the CARES Act to monitor the spending of pandemic relief funds, the PRAC released a report in June warning of delays in processing tax refunds at the IRS and potential fraud in Small Business Administration loans, among other issues. However, its work may have been stymied early on when Trump removed from his position Glenn Fine, an inspector general who had been the PRACs chair.
According to the New York Times, Trump did not give a specific reason for the removal, calling it part of a larger reshuffling response to reports of bias, among other issues. But Democrats at the time raised concern that Trump was meddling with the oversight panel, with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer warning that the president was abusing the coronavirus pandemic to eliminate honest and independent public servants because they are willing to speak truth to power and because he is so clearly afraid of strong oversight.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration has defended its response to the Covid-19 crisis. The White House has not responded to Voxs request for comment for this story, but spokesperson Sarah Matthews previously told Voxs German Lopez that Trump has led an historic, whole-of-America coronavirus response following expert advice, and that this strong leadership will continue.
The senators letter, however, tells a different story. And whether or not the PRAC ever takes up the call to investigate, the document remains an enumeration of the ways the Trump administration appears to have ignored or actively disregarded science and public health, and the American people have suffered as a result.
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In a special virtual town hall, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi joined UC San Francisco Chancellor Sam Hawgood, MBBS, to discuss the role of science and science advocacy in shaping federal policy during a global pandemic, her leadership during these turbulent times, and lessons learned during her long tenure as the first and only female Speaker of the House of Representatives.
The Democratic Congresswoman, whose district covers a large portion of San Francisco, began the event on Tuesday by thanking UCSF for being a longtime partner and leader in science and health, both in San Francisco and worldwide. She recalled how decades earlier, UCSFs work in community-based research, prevention and care during the HIV/AIDS epidemic helped lead to the Ryan White CARE act.
Asked about the national response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Pelosi said denial and distortion of the reality of the pandemic had prevented a more coordinated national response. There are two things here at work that are not so good: One is an anti-science attitude, and the other is an anti-government attitude, she said. So lets just hope that rather than looking back, that we can look forward and hope that the public awareness of all of this will take us to a place where we have unity around science.
Hawgood said the pandemic had raised the question of how research universities like UCSF could contribute to preparing for and responding to future pandemics. History tells us that COVID-19 will definitely not be the last pandemic that we experience in our lifetimes, he said. And Ive been thinking and speaking to my peers across the country about how we could perhaps create a more unified research university academic response in working with the federal government to prepare the country for what we know will come.
Pelosi said that support from universities would be critical for legislative funding, such as when leading institutions came together in the 1990s to help double the National Institutes of Health budget.
The conversation then turned to how the pandemic has affected early career scientists and how the federal government could help. Hawgood described the risk of losing a generation of early career scientists, particularly women, due to lack of support for caregivers, as an existential challenge.
Pelosi said that a massive investment in childcare, more debt forgiveness for students, and expanding access to healthcare was needed on a national level.
She said that evidence-based research, including UCSFs work in COVID-19 testing in the Mission District which showed that the Latinx community was disproportionately affected by the disease was critical to getting Congress to recognize and redress health disparities.
Its immoral for us to proceed with this without recognizing the disparity in the communities of color you know that better than anyone, she said to Hawgood. But we have to kind of convey that to some people who, shall we say, are not as close to the public experience as some of the rest of us are.
We just have to recognize that if were going to crush this virus, which we must do, it is going to take resources scientifically spent, she said.
Finally, asked how her approach to leadership has changed over time and lessons learned for aspiring leaders, Pelosi said the best advice was to be authentic and to know your own motivations. But to women, especially, I say, be ready. Because I didnt think for a minute I would be going to Congress and never thought I would run for leadership, but I was ready.
Join our students, faculty, staff, alumni and supporters who stand up for values and policies fundamental to UCSFs mission of advancing health worldwide.
Become a UCSF advocate
Pelosi closed out her portion of the town hall with a question-and-answer segment, facilitated by Francesca Vega, Vice Chancellor of Community and Government Relations. Asked how the UCSF community could help the democratic process during the pandemic, Pelosi encouraged people to vote early. Right now the most important thing is for people to vote and to do so early enough so that their vote is counted as cast, she said.
The town hall continued with brief presentations by Keith Yamamoto, PhD, Special Advisor to the Chancellor for Science Policy and Strategy, and Natalie Alpert, Executive Director of Federal Government Relations, discussing the continued need for advocacy at the federal level.
Vega ended the event by bringing attention to various voter engagement efforts across UCSF, including the UCSF Votes initiative to update addresses for mailed ballots. Now is the ask of all of you, she said. And thats ensuring that our voice is indeed heard and that we are aware of all the opportunities that we have within the UCSF community to get engaged.
ALBANY The University at Albany announced on Wednesday the impending launch of new COVID-19 surveillance testing for the thousands of people on campus, testing that will be developed by the university's research arm, the RNA Institute.
The testing process is currently being piloted and will launch on Sept. 7.
"Clearly, if you look at our plan, if you look at our practices, if you look at our implementation, you look at our testing, it is a very robust system," said UAlbany President Havidn Rodrguez.
The tests which are being developed, conducted and diagnosed at UAlbany are not diagnostic, but rather "pooled testing." Those who are tested are notified whether they are a potential or presumed positive, then go in for a followup diagnostic test.
During the week of the Sept. 7 launch, researchers plan to conduct 600 tests. About 2,000 tests will be conducted the second week, and 5,000 per week from then on.
"The goal is to test everyone on campus at least three times students, faculty and staff," said RNA DirectorAndrew Berglund.
The tests will be mandatory for all those who are physically on campus.
In addition to surveillance testing, the university is having students, faculty and staff fill out symptom screeners every day.
The announcement comes the day after university officials announced a student on campus had tested positive for COVID-19, and had been self-isolating since Friday. Officials said students who were near the main fountain on campus Thursday night may have been exposed to coronavirus.
The university worked in collaboration with Albany County to conduct contact tracing after the positive diagnosis. Albany County Executive Dan McCoy said on Wednesday that 10 people have been identified so far as having had close contact with the student who contracted the virus.
"We all knew that it was not a matter of 'if,' it was a matter of 'when,'" Rodriguez said. "It's about having a robust plan."
Since classes resumed Monday, 58 percent have been conducted online, 36 percent in-person and the remainder have been hybrid, Rodriguez said.
The dorms have been at 57 percent occupancy and half of the university staff has been working remotely.
McCoy commended the university's plan, saying it worked and "everything that was in place did what it needed to do."
SUNY Chancellor Jim Malatrasadded that the student did the right thing by getting tested and self-isolating.
"It's all working exactly the way it's supposed to work so we can control the beast which is COVID-19," he said.
As students, faculty, and staff trickle back to campus, Harvard has set up a testing apparatus aimed at stopping the spread of coronavirus. Students living in campus housing have to get tested three times each week; most other affiliates have to get tested once a week.
Still, there are some factors Harvard cant entirely account for, including the hundreds of students moving into off-campus housing in Cambridge and Boston over the next several weeks. At other colleges and universities across the country, off-campus housing has been the locus of several COVID-19 outbreaks, in some cases causing schools to shift their reopening plans entirely online. It remains unclear whether those students will cause a rise in Cambridges case count.
Below is a summary of the data Harvard and the city of Cambridge have reported about test results in the area.
Last updated on August 26, 2020 at 5:02 p.m.
Live updates: Oregons COVID-19 death toll hits 427 - OPB
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By opb Staff (opb)
Aug. 26, 2020 1 p.m. Updated: Aug. 26, 2020 6:02 p.m.
Oregons death toll from the coronavirus pandemic continues to climb: seven more cases announced Tuesday brought the death toll to 427, according to the Oregon Health Authority.
Public health officials and elected leaders like Gov. Kate Brown have emphasized the need to drastically reduce the number of new cases announced each day, but the Oregon Health Authority reported that the number remains stubbornly high at 247 new confirmed and presumptive cases, bringing the state total to 25,391.
The new cases are spread across 23 Oregon counties from Baker and Malheur along the states eastern border to the largest numbers in the Willamette Valley - including 48 new cases in Multnomah County, 40 new cases in Marion County and 38 new infections in Washington. Five counties reported just one case: Clatsop, Deschutes, Polk, Tillamook and Wallowa.
The seven fatalities range in age from a 63 year-old man who died at home in Umatilla County to a 93 year-old woman who died at her residence in Lincoln County. All seven people who died were identified as having underlying health conditions.
Many professors at Southern Oregon University in Ashland expressed relief when the campus announced this summer that most courses would be taught online.
But the transition to a new model of teaching has brought long-workdays, technical challenges and an emotional burden that faculty members
I am 100% burned out and so is everyone I know, said SOU digital media professor Andrew Gay. I think that all of us are still pretty much in crisis mode of knowing that we have these really difficult tasks.
Related: SOU professors say theyre overwhelmed with new COVID-related workloads
The Pacific Crest Trail Association is will not begin issuing long-distance hike permits in October as originally planned. Organizers cited the ongoing pandemic and continuing spread of the coronavirus on their website. Instead theyll be monitoring the situation for next year and will reevaluate 2021 permits by mid-January. The nonprofit group is urging people to hike locally rather than tackle the 2,600-mile-through hike, though its warnings are non-binding and some backpackers have still insisted on hitting the trail.
Related: Pacific Crest Trail Association postpones 2021 permits
With hundreds of thousands out of work, Washington and California have instituted some of the countrys strongest directives to ensure people dont have their power or water shut off because they cant pay their bills.
Oregon Gov. Kate Brown, meanwhile, has been almost completely silent on the issue, preferring in many cases to trust that utilities around the state will protect customers struggling amid unprecedented circumstances.
Consumer advocates say that trust might be misplaced. While the states large investor-owned utilities like Portland General Electric and Pacific Power arent currently pulling the plug when customers cant pay their bill, many of Oregons consumer-owned utilities have ended a self-imposed moratorium in recent weeks, resuming regular disconnection practices.
Related: Some Oregon utilities resume disconnecting customers
Oregon Gov. Kate Brown has plans to commute the sentences of more prison inmates who are particularly vulnerable to COVID-19.
The Department of Corrections has seen some of the states biggest outbreaks of the disease, with 613 inmates and 177 staff who have tested positive for the virus. The department reported that 513 inmates and 139 staff members have recovered. Three inmates have died from the virus.
In June, the governorcommuted the sentencesof 57 people who are incarcerated.
The governor will only consider releasing inmates who are within two months of release, are not serving a sentence for a violent crime against another person, have suitable housing upon release, and have had good behavior while in custody for at least a year.
Related: Oregon Gov. Kate Brown prepares to commute more sentences of inmates vulnerable to COVID-19
Another 20 people tested positive for the novel coronavirus in Clark County, Washington, and one additional person has person died, the local public health department reported Tuesday. To date, 2,455 residents of the county have tested positive for the virus and 48 have died. The man who died was older than 80 and had no underlying medical conditions, officials said.
Since the start of the pandemic, 71,705 people have been diagnosed with COVID-19 in Washington, and 1,876 have died, according to the latest data available from the state.
Sign up to get important news and culture from around the Northwest, delivered to your inbox six days a week.
As school reopening looms, a positive COVID-19 result at a Portland child care center presents a best case for how to deal with the virus.
Multnomah county's public health officer, Dr. Jennifer Vines, said that while older adults are at the highest risk for severe COVID-19, the infection can be a risky roll of the dice for younger people, too.
A woman spits into a tube so that her saliva can be tested for the presence of the novel coronavirus.
By Robert F. ServiceAug. 24, 2020 , 5:00 PM
Sciences COVID-19 reporting is supported by the Pulitzer Center and the Heising-Simons Foundation.
First, a technician pushes a pencil-length swab to the very back of your nasal passages. Then you pay $100 or more, and wait days for an answer. But faster, cheaper, more pleasant ways to test for the novel coronavirus are coming online. This month, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration granted emergency use authorization for two tests that sample saliva instead of nasal fluid, and more innovations are likely after FDA relaxed rules to allow new tests to be adopted more quickly. One candidate was announced last week: an experimental test, potentially faster and cheaper, that analyzes saliva in a new way.
There is real promise here, says Anne Wyllie, a microbiologist at Yale University who helped develop one of the new tests authorized this month. Takanori Teshima, chief of laboratory medicine at Hokkaido University, who also reported successful results testing saliva, agrees. It will have a big impact worldwide.
When SARS-CoV-2, the respiratory virus that causes COVID-19, emerged in December 2019, researchers scrambled to develop tests to detect the virus. Initially, they turned to a long-trusted technique for diagnosing respiratory infections: looking for viral genetic material in mucosal fluid, thought to be the best hunting ground for a respiratory virus, collected from deep in a patients nasal passages. Thats where the 15-centimeter swab comes in. The swab goes into a plastic tube with a chemical mixture that stabilizes the virus during transport to a diagnostics lab. There, technicians extract its genetic material and load it into a machine to carry out the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), which amplifies snippets of genetic material unique to the virus.
The procedure accurately identifies infections about 95% of the time. But the test is uncomfortable and, because collecting the swab requires close contact with patients, it puts medical personnel at risk of contracting the virus. Nobody wants to do that job, Teshima says.
Testing saliva for SARS-CoV-2 was no sure thing. Studies with other respiratory diseases showed saliva tests identified only about 90% of people for whom swab tests indicated an infection. But the appeal of an easier and safer test for the new coronavirus led researchers to try. People being tested simply drool into a bar-coded plastic tube, seal it, and drop it in a pouch thats shipped to a lab for PCR analysis. Because the procedure directly tests the fluid responsible for transmitting the virus between people, it may give a better indication of who is most contagious, says Paul Hergenrother, a chemist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), who led his universitys saliva test development.
As early as 12 February, researchers in Hong Kong and China reported inClinical Infectious Diseasesthat they couldidentify SARS-CoV-2 from salivain 11 of 12 patients whose swabs showed virus. Since then, groups in the United States, Singapore, and Japan have confirmed and further simplified the procedures, cutting out costly steps such as adding specialized reagents to stabilize the virus during transport and extract the genetic material.
In May, Wyllie and Yale colleagues teamed up with the National Basketball Association, which provided $500,000 to develop Yales saliva test; the test is now used for frequently testing players. On 4 August, the Yale team posted a preprint on medRxiv that said its saliva testagreed with swab results 94% of the time, at a cost of as little as $1.29 per sample, roughly 1/100 as much as commercial swab-based tests. On 15 August, FDA granted emergency approval for the SalivaDirect test, so that other FDA-approved labs can use the protocol. Last week, the agency extended approval to the UIUC test given its similarity to the Yale test. UIUC is now using its saliva test to test all 60,000 students, faculty, and staff twice a week, so they can isolate infected individuals as quickly as possible. Testing saliva makes sense scientifically, and it makes sense logistically, Hergenrother says.
Anew saliva test for RNA viruses, such as Zika and SARS-CoV-2, was reported last week inScience Advancesby researchers at the University at Albany. It could be even faster and cheaper because it does not need expensive lab equipment such as PCR machines. Rather than amplifying RNA to identify the virus, the approach uses snippets of DNA that bind to short, unique sections of RNA and change them from linear strands to loops. That alters how the RNA behaves in a common lab procedure known as gel electrophoresis, making it easy to detect. This is innovative, Wyllie says.
A relaxation of FDA rules announced last week could lead to still more variants. The new rules allow approved clinical labs to use tests they have developed without any additional approval step. In a tweet, Michael Mina, an epidemiologist at Harvard Universitys T.H. Chan School of Public Health, called FDAs decision Huge news!! because it would encourage labs to develop novel tests. It may also help speed development ofrapid tests that look for viral proteinsrather than genetic materialan efficient way to screen large numbers of asymptomatic people.
We dont need one test to be the end all and be all, Wyllie says. We just want options.
As the Asian populations declined, African pangolins began flowing east in large quantities. Since early times, many peoples of sub-Saharan Africa have harvested pangolins, trapping the animals with snares, tracking them with dogs, or coming across them in the forest. The hunters traditionally consumed their catch or sold it into local bush-meat markets. Eventually, the meat became popular in cities, too, such as Libreville, in Gabon, and Yaound, in Cameroon, and that led to rising prices around the start of the twenty-first century. The scales mostly moved through the ports and airports of Nigeria and Cameroon to Asia, especially China and Vietnam.
I know were serving as a transit point, Olajumoke Morenikeji told me recently. Shes a zoologist, and a founderof the Pangolin Conservation Guild Nigeria. To judge from the thousands of kilograms of scales seized, she said, you cant have all that just coming from Nigeria.
Luc Evouna Embolo, an officer for TRAFFIC, an international network that monitors the wildlife trade, gave a similar account from Yaound. Increasingly, middlemen incite local people to collect pangolins from the field and sell to them. The middlemen sell to urban businessmen who illegally export the animals. A villager might get paid three thousand C.F.A. francs (roughly five dollars) for a pangolin that will be worth thirty dollars in Douala, Cameroons economic capital, and much more in China. In 2017, police made one seizure amounting to more than five tons of scales, for which two Chinese traffickers were arrested.
In late 2016, CITES had decided to make all international trade of wild-caught pangolins and their parts illegal, but the traffic continued. Its scope could now be gauged only from the fraction seized by customs officials and other national enforcement authorities or detected by non-governmental investigators. By one estimate, almost nine hundred thousand pangolins have been smuggled during the past two decades. Some were alive. Some were dead, peeled of scales and frozen gray. The scales were concealed in sacks or boxes within shipping containers, sometimes labelled as cashews, oyster shells, or scrap plastic. Those who track this commerce, such as Challender and Heinrich, say that pangolins seem to be the most heavily trafficked wild mammals in the world.
There is a vogue in urban China for ye wei, or wild tasteswildlife meat, supposedly imbued with healthful, invigorating properties. Some consumers cherish the notion that eating pangolin is a revered national tradition. But that notion has lately been challenged. Earlier this year, a Chinese journalist named Wufei Yu published an Op-Ed in the Times highlighting old texts that advise against consuming the flesh of certain wild animals, notably snakes, badgers, and pangolins. Yu found that in 652, during the Tang dynasty, an alchemist named Sun Simiao warned about lurking ailments in our stomachs. Dont eat the meat of pangolins, because it may trigger them and harm us. A millennium later, in a compendium of medical and herbal lore now considered foundational to T.C.M., the physician Li Shizhen cautioned that eating pangolin could lead to diarrhea, fever, and convulsions. Pangolin scales could be useful for medicines, Li Shizhen allowed, but beware the meat.
Zhou Jinfeng, a noted conservationist who heads the China Biodiversity Conservation and Green Development Foundation, in Beijing, added a caustic dismissal. Its not a matter of tradition, he told me by Skype. Its a matter of money.
And now, along with the traffic of pangolins into China, a new concern has arisen: the traffic of certain viruses. There was an unheeded signal last year. On March 24, 2019, the Guangdong Wildlife Rescue Center, in Guangzhou, took custody of twenty-one live Sunda pangolins that had been seized by customs police. Most of the animals were in bad health, with skin eruptions and in respiratory distress; sixteen died. Necropsies showed a pattern of swollen lungs containing frothy fluid, and in some cases a swollen liver and spleen. A trio of scientists based at a Guangzhou governmental laboratory and at the Guangzhou Zoo, led by Jin-Ping Chen, took tissue samples from eleven of the animals and searched for genomic evidence of viruses. They found signs of Sendai virus, harmless to people but known for causing illness in rodents. They also found fragments of coronaviruses, a family high on the watch list of viruses potentially dangerous to humans. Still, this was not big news when the Chen group published its report, on October 24th. The scientists noted that either Sendai or a coronavirus might have killed these pangolins, that further study could help with pangolin conservation, and that such viruses might be capable of crossing into other mammals.
Three months later, the word coronavirus carried a different ring. An initial small cluster of abnormal pneumonia cases had appeared in Wuhan, the capital of Hubei Province; soon the number had exploded to thousands, and the city was in lockdown; Chinese sources had revealed that a novel coronavirus was the cause of this disease; the first genome had been sequenced and released, by a Chinese team led by Yong-Zhen Zhang, of Fudan University, and with one Western partner, Edward C.Holmes, who arranged to make the sequence public on a Web site called Virological, run by a colleague at the University of Edinburgh; cases had started turning up elsewhere, including South Korea, Singapore, and the United States; the World Health Organization had declared a global health emergency; and everyone was now watching. Scientists who understand zoonotic diseasesthe diseases caused by pathogens that pass from nonhuman animals into humanshad begun asking, Which animal was the source? Everything comes from somewhere, and novel viruses come to people from wildlife, sometimes through an intermediary animal that may or may not be wild.
Bats were prime suspects, because the SARS virus that surfaced in 2002highly lethal and transmissible, but quickly contained by the middle of 2003had been a coronavirus hosted by bats. The MERS virus, which emerged on the Arabian Peninsula in 2012, even more lethal but less transmissible than SARS-CoV (as that first virus became known), was also a coronavirus traceable to bats, though in that case the bat virus had established itself in camels for some decades before spilling over into humans. Another notion about the new viruss host was snakesa suggestion made in late January, 2020, based on tenuous evidence, and quickly dismissed.
The attention swung back to bats on February 3rd, when a group led by Zheng-Li Shi, of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, presented genomic data showing a close similarity between the new virus and a coronavirus sequence they had found, half a dozen years earlier, among horseshoe bats in a mine shaft in Yunnan Province, a thousand miles southwest of Wuhan. The genome of this bat virus, now called RaTG13, was 96.2 per cent identical to the new human coronavirus. This was strong evidence that the new virus originally came from bats, but a four-per-cent difference between the genomes was far from a perfect match. Four per cent, in fact, implies decades of evolutionary divergence. Where had the new virus spent that timein what population of bats or other animalsand how had it spilled from one of them into its first human host? With those questions pending, another candidate for the intermediary emerged. On February 7th, the president of South China Agricultural University, in Guangzhou, declared at a press conference that a team from her institution, in work not yet published, had found what may be an intermediate host of the virus, bridging the gap between bats and humans: pangolins. According to a report by Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency, the pangolin virus that the researchers had investigated was a ninety-nine-per-cent match with the coronavirus showing up in people.
The announcement was an overstatement of what the researchers had found, but it caused a flurry of headlines. Even the CITES secretariat, based in Geneva, echoed the claim, tweeting the next day that #Pangolins may have spread #coronavirus to humans, and sugaring that sour tweet with video footage of cute pangolinsone of them a female with a juvenile on her backclimbing tree branches and snooping for ants. The implication was: these adorable animals carry lethal viruses, so best to leave them alone. When the study from South China Ag. went online, the big result was not quite as big as advertised, though it was still dramatic. The coronavirus genome that these researchers had assembled, from pangolin lung-tissue samples, contained some gene regions that were ninety-nine per cent similar to equivalent parts of the SARS-CoV-2 genomebut the over-all match wasnt that close. Maybe two coronaviruses had mergedin a single animal, the researchers wrote,and swapped sections of their genomesa recombination event. Such an event may even have proved fateful, by patching one genomic section of a pangolin coronavirus together with a bat coronavirus. That section, known as the receptor binding domain (R.B.D.), endowed the composite virus with an extraordinary capacity to seize and infect certain human cells, including some in the respiratory tract.
