Experts announced yesterday, Sunday, that they are currently studying the fact that the new coronavirus, "SARS Cove 2", is transmitted from Mink to humans, or vice versa, against the background of a case in Spain that reinforces the hypothesis.
This came after the Spanish and Dutch authorities killed more than a million animals of the mink family, as a precaution, after the outbreak of Corona causing Covid-19 disease in a number of mink breeding farms in both countries.
Anatolia quoted Associated Press, quoting a number of experts, as saying that the outbreak of the Coronavirus among minks on a number of farms in the Netherlands and Spain may have started with the injured workers, although officials are not sure of this proposal.
The Dutch government and one of the researchers suggested that it was "also reasonable" that some workers had picked up the virus from minks.
"The virus that was transmitted between animals was similar to that transmitted between humans," said Wim van der Boel, a Dutch expert who studies viruses at Wageningen University and Research.
studies
"We assumed, after studies, that the corona virus could be transmitted again from animals to humans," he said, noting that infection of at least two workers at a mink farm (in Spain) reinforces this hypothesis.
Two workers on a mink breeding farm near La Puebla de Valverde, in north-eastern Spain, were infected with the virus, after the farm was closed due to the outbreak of the Corona virus among its animals and a number of workers.
In late May, seven out of 14 people were found injured on the farm, including the owner, in Coruna, in addition to ten minks.
"If this event is confirmed, it will be the first known case of corona from animals to humans," said Richard Ostfield, researcher at the Curry Institute for Ecological Studies in Millbrook (based in New York).
"In the event that there is evidence of coronavirus transmission from mink to humans, we will certainly need to pay attention to the possibility of the virus being transmitted from infected domesticated animals to us," he told the Associated Press by email.
Farmer
At a time when the World Health Organization has noticed that the transfer on mink farms can take place in "both directions (from humans to animals and vice versa)", Maria Van Kerkhov, a WHO official, said in June that this hypothesis was "very limited", according to the source. same.
The organization warned today, Monday, that there may be no "magic bullet" to eradicate the Corona virus, despite high hopes for a vaccine against Covid-19 disease, caused by the virus.
"There is no magic solution at the moment, and it may never exist," Tidros Adhanum Gebresos, the organization's director-general, said in an online press briefing from headquarters in Geneva.