8:47 a.m .: How do you find the animal that caused the disease?
You have to identify all types of animals sold in the market, and test to see if they carry the virus. For this, we perform “a pharyngeal sample (in the throat, note) and a stool sample”, according to Arnaud Fontanet, of the Pasteur Institute. Failing to dispose of the animal itself, it is also necessary to collect excrement from the wild. “Thousands of droppings have been collected from many sites in Africa,” said Martine Peeters, of the IRD (Research Institute for Development), who investigated in Africa to find the animal reservoir for the Ebola virus.
This is no doubt also what Chinese researchers did for the new coronavirus, especially since the Wuhan market was closed at the start of the epidemic. At the end of January, they said “they had taken 585 samples from stalls and a garbage truck” from the market, and “having found the coronavirus in 33 of them,” said Professor Fontanet. “They don’t say which samples it was, but I think it was excrement lying around on the benches. “
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