AGL 40.00 No Change ▼ 0.00 (0%)
AIRLINK 129.06 Decreased By ▼ -0.47 (-0.36%)
BOP 6.75 Increased By ▲ 0.07 (1.05%)
CNERGY 4.49 Decreased By ▼ -0.14 (-3.02%)
DCL 8.55 Decreased By ▼ -0.39 (-4.36%)
DFML 40.82 Decreased By ▼ -0.87 (-2.09%)
DGKC 80.96 Decreased By ▼ -2.81 (-3.35%)
FCCL 32.77 No Change ▼ 0.00 (0%)
FFBL 74.43 Decreased By ▼ -1.04 (-1.38%)
FFL 11.74 Increased By ▲ 0.27 (2.35%)
HUBC 109.58 Decreased By ▼ -0.97 (-0.88%)
HUMNL 13.75 Decreased By ▼ -0.81 (-5.56%)
KEL 5.31 Decreased By ▼ -0.08 (-1.48%)
KOSM 7.72 Decreased By ▼ -0.68 (-8.1%)
MLCF 38.60 Decreased By ▼ -1.19 (-2.99%)
NBP 63.51 Increased By ▲ 3.22 (5.34%)
OGDC 194.69 Decreased By ▼ -4.97 (-2.49%)
PAEL 25.71 Decreased By ▼ -0.94 (-3.53%)
PIBTL 7.39 Decreased By ▼ -0.27 (-3.52%)
PPL 155.45 Decreased By ▼ -2.47 (-1.56%)
PRL 25.79 Decreased By ▼ -0.94 (-3.52%)
PTC 17.50 Decreased By ▼ -0.96 (-5.2%)
SEARL 78.65 Decreased By ▼ -3.79 (-4.6%)
TELE 7.86 Decreased By ▼ -0.45 (-5.42%)
TOMCL 33.73 Decreased By ▼ -0.78 (-2.26%)
TPLP 8.40 Decreased By ▼ -0.66 (-7.28%)
TREET 16.27 Decreased By ▼ -1.20 (-6.87%)
TRG 58.22 Decreased By ▼ -3.10 (-5.06%)
UNITY 27.49 Increased By ▲ 0.06 (0.22%)
WTL 1.39 Increased By ▲ 0.01 (0.72%)
BR100 10,445 Increased By 38.5 (0.37%)
BR30 31,189 Decreased By -523.9 (-1.65%)
KSE100 97,798 Increased By 469.8 (0.48%)
KSE30 30,481 Increased By 288.3 (0.95%)

GENEVA: An advance team from the World Health Organization (WHO) has left for China to organise an investigation into the origins of the novel coronavirus which sparked the global pandemic, a spokeswoman said on Friday.

The virus is believed to have emerged in a wholesale market in the central Chinese city of Wuhan late last year, since then closed, after jumping the species barrier from the animal kingdom to infect humans. The two WHO experts, specialists in animal health and epidemiology, will work with Chinese scientists to determine the scope and itinerary of the investigation, WHO spokeswoman Margaret Harris said, declining to name them.

"They have gone, they are in the air now, they are the advance party that is to work out the scope," she told a briefing.

This would involve negotiations on issues including the composition of the fuller team, she added. "One of the big issues that everybody is interested in, and of course that's why we're sending an animal health expert, is to look at whether or not it jumped from species to a human and what species it jumped from," Harris said.

"We know it's very, very similar to the virus in the bat, but did it go through an intermediate species? This is a question we all need answered," she said. U.S. President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Michael Pompeo have said it may have originated in a laboratory in Wuhan, although they have presented no evidence for this and China strongly denies it. Scientists and U.S. intelligence agencies have said it emerged in nature. "If there was wrongdoing - and we may never know that for sure - it will be very hard to uncover," Lawrence Gostin, a professor at Georgetown Law in Washington, D.C., told Reuters. "The wet market was closed immediately. There is no independent record, evaluation or investigation of a potential zoonotic source, so it will be very hard to go back and piece together," he said.

Comments

Comments are closed.