EPISODE 661 THE WUHAN MARKET, HORSESHOE BATS, RACCOON DOGS, AND THE COVID 19 VIRUS (OCT. 19, 2022) ALAN SKEOCH
alan skeoch
oct. 19, 2022
HORESHOE BAT …
Cute little fellows? Not cute at all…the link between Covid 19 and humanity
RACCOON DOG
One of the rarest animal in the world…a raccoon dog. No others in
its family tree save , perhaps distant connection to the fox family.
I had never heard of raccoon dogs until I got Covid 19 on Oct. 16, 2022.
The was my 84th birthday and I was sick, really sick after a root canal surgery
three days earlier on Thursday Oct. 14, 2022. On those days I had no reason to link
my illness to this RACCOON DOG, one of the rarest creatures on earth today.
the Raccoon dog today is on the verge of extinction.
CUTE, but also very dangerous. Raccoon dogs are now the chief suspects in the spread of the Coronavirus around the world with
hundreds of thousands of deaths.
How can the scourge be traced to Raccoon dogs? Indeed, how can Covid 19’s history even be traced back in time?
Many teams of scientists have been doing this and their weapon is the SWAB. those little sticks with some fluff on the
tip. Thousands and thousands of these swabs have been used to ‘wipe down’ suspected concentrations of the Covid 19
virus…a virus so small that it can only be seen through electron microscopes.
THE WUHAN MARKET PLACE, WUHAN CITY, CHINA
January 1, 2020, The Wuhan Police shut down the Wuhan Market. Guards prevent entry.
There are 11 million people living in Wuhan! I had never heard of the place until the global pandemic arrived. And the scourge arrived
with the speed of summer lightning. On Feb 29, 2020 I was guest speaker at a meeting in Mississauga. My subject was Invasive
species and the Great Lakes. We had an audience of 100 people at the Stonehooker Brewey in the City of Mississauga..
Covic 19 was not on my list of invasive species. Not that day. But the next day March 1, 2020, Covid 19 was on the tip
of everyone’s tongue. The virus had become a pandemic which spread around the world between December, 2019 and
March 2020. The Grim Reaper followed.
World Health scientists, Chinese national health scientists, Independent scientists have swabbed the Wuhan market
from floor to table height….from cage to cage searching for concentrations or even evidence of the presence of
the Coronavirus.
They found one corner of the market…a tiny corner where once stood several live animal cages holding
two racoon dog cages and a fox cage. the rest of the huge market was blank…no sign of Covid 19 but
this corner was dense with contaminated swabs.
And one table was loaded with evidence….that table may have been the table where one or perhaps
both of the raccoon dogs wee slaughtered and their wild meat carried away to contaminate the whole of
planet earth.
There is now almost total agreement that these two raccoon dogs provided the Intermediate link between
the Horseshoe bats who carried the virus and the transfer of the virus to the first few humans.
(There remains the possibility, remote though it be, that some human carrier brought the virus
to the market and gave the Covid 19 to the racoon dogs instead of the other way around.
This is a one in a thousand possibility.)
CASE OF ALAN SKEOCH…HOW DID ALAN GET THE VIRUS?
We did the Covid Test twice and each time I got the red line…..positive test for Covid 19
“AT 5 P.M. on Oct. 13, 2020, I stepped out of my dentists office with a new root canal.
I felt good. Some pain which I was sure would diminish. Instead of getting into the car
right away, I turned left nd walked about 100 yards to the Salvation Army Thrift Store
to look at there book collection and perhaps buy a couple. Passed three very down at the heal
man on the way Then I got in the car
and drove home.
Did someone cough passing me in those hundred feet and a droplet got ingested?
Was my mask ineffective? Had persons with Covid 19 been handling the
books before me?
I was contaminated but did not know it. How?
I have no idea. I did not know that I Had been contaminated with Covid 19 until
October 18 when my dentist wondered at my prolonged sickness after surgeryd, “Is there a chance you have Covid 19?”
“Let’s see … we have the test kit.”
“Cn’t see how I can have picked up Covid 19?”
“That is probably what most infected people say.”
“You know what else people say?”
“They think those Raccoon dogs are really cute”
“Turns out they are not cute at al….they are carriers of disease.”
The Covid 19 virus seems to have originated as living material in Horseshoe
bats living in wild properties north and west of Wuhann, China. No danger unless
doing scientific work in a bat cave stumbling on the bat excrement, perhaps toaching live bats.
Rare. But Chinese scientists were, at the time studying these pats and the diseases they
carried.
What was needed was to find an Intermediate carrier of Covid 19, a creature that might have more direct contact
with humans.
NOTES FROM VARIOUS SOURCES
Background
HORSESHOE BATS and PIPISTRELLE BATS
THE carriers of the Covid 19 viruses.
“Among all the known creatures, the bats are rich in various viruses inside. You can find most viruses responsible for human diseases like rabies, SARS, and Ebola,” Tian Junhua, a Wuhan CDC (Centre for
Disease Control) researcher, says in the video. “It is while discovering new viruses that we are most at risk of infection
Bats, with extensive geographical distribution and capability of flight, constitute the second largest group of mammalian species and have been documented as natural hosts of a large number of diverse viruses such as lyssaviruses, paramyxoviruses and filoviruses [
1,
2]. In the past decade, numerous novel coronaviruses have been discovered in a wide variety of bat species throughout Asia, Europe, Africa and America [
3]. Within the coronavirus genera
Alphacoronavirus and
Betacoronavirus, which mainly infect mammals, 7 out of the 15 currently assigned viral species have only been found in bats [
4]. It is proposed that bats are major hosts for alphacoronaviruses and betacoronaviruses and play an important role as the gene source in the evolution of these two coronavirus genera [
5]. Among the coronaviruses harbored by bats, some have drawn particular research interests, as they have been found to be associated with two high profile human disease outbreaks, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS).
Scientists have released three studies that reveal intriguing new clues about how the COVID-19 pandemic started. Two of the reports trace the outbreak back to a massive market that sold live animals, among other goods, in Wuhan, China1,2, and a third suggests that the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 spilled over from animals — possibly those sold at the market — to humans at least twice in November or December 20193. Posted on 25 and 26 February, all three are preprints, and so have not been published in a peer-reviewed journal.
These analyses add weight to original suspicions that the pandemic began at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, which many of the people who were infected earliest with SARS-CoV-2 had visited. The preprints contain genetic analyses of coronavirus samples collected from the market and from people infected in December 2019 and January 2020, as well as geolocation analyses connecting many of the samples to a section of the market where live animals were sold. Taken together, these lines of evidence point towards the market as the source of the outbreak — a situation akin to that seen in the epidemic of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in 2002–04, for which animal markets were found to be ground zero — says Kristian Andersen, a virologist at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, and an author on two of the reports. “This is extremely strong evidence,” he says.
Did the coronavirus jump from animals to people twice?
However, none of the studies contains definitive evidence about what type of animal might have harboured the virus before it spread to humans. Andersen speculates that the culprits could be raccoon dogs, squat dog-like mammals used for food and their fur in China. One of the studies he co-authored2 suggests that raccoon dogs were sold in a section of the market where several positive samples were collected. And reports4 show that the animals can harbour other types of coronavirus.
Nevertheless, some virologists say that the new evidence pointing to the Huanan market doesn’t rule out an alternative hypothesis. They say that the market could just have been the location of a massive amplifying event, in which an infected person spread the virus to many other people, rather than the site of the original spillover.
“Analysis-wise, this is excellent work, but it remains open to interpretation,” says Vincent Munster, a virologist at the Rocky Mountain Laboratories, a division of the National Institutes of Health in Hamilton, Montana. He says that searching for SARS-CoV-2 and antibodies against it in blood samples collected from animals sold at the market, and from people who sold animals at the market, could provide more-definitive evidence of COVID-19’s origins. The number of positive samples from the market does suggest an animal source, Munster says. But he is frustrated that more-thorough investigations haven’t already been conducted: “We are talking about a pandemic that has upended the lives of so many people.”
Ground zero?
In early January 2020, Chinese authorities identified the Huanan market as a potential source of a viral outbreak because most people infected with COVID-19 at that time had been there in the days before they began to show symptoms, or were in contact with people who had been. Hoping to stem the outbreak, the authorities closed the market. Researchers then collected samples from poultry, snakes, badgers, giant salamanders, Siamese crocodiles and other animals sold there. They also swabbed drains, cages, toilets and vendors’ stalls in search of the pathogen. Following an investigation led by the World Health Organization (WHO), researchers released a report in March 2021 showing that all of the nearly 200 samples collected directly from animals were negative, but that around 1,000 environmental samples from the stalls and other areas of the market were positive.
A team in China including researchers at China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has now sequenced genetic material recovered from those positive samples, and released the results in a preprint posted on 25 February1. The scientists confirm that the samples contain SARS-CoV-2 sequences almost identical to those that have been circulating in humans. Furthermore, they show that the two original virus lineages circulating at the start of the pandemic, called A and B, were both present at the market.
“It’s a nice piece of work,” says Ray Yip, an epidemiologist and a former director of the China branch of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “They’ve confirmed that the Huanan market was indeed a very important spreading location.”
As soon as the report from China had been posted online, Andersen and his colleagues rushed to post manuscripts they had been working on for weeks.
