The most trafficked mammal on the planet has been named as the latest candidate in the search for the animal source of the coronavirus epidemic in China. The pangolin is an endangered, scaly, ant-eating mammal that is imported in huge numbers to Chinese markets for food and medicine. All four Asian species are critically endangered.
It is still far from clear whether or not the pangolin is actually the animal that passed the new virus to humans. Bats are still thought to be the original host of the virus, with pangolins only acting as an intermediate host in the disease transmission. However the science so far is suggestive rather than conclusive, and due to the increased interest in the virus, some claims have unfortunately been made public before any scientific review process can even be conducted.
As a result, specialists who are studying the disease are still trying to establish just what animals were present in the market in Wuhan. Any scientific claims unsupported by any clinical evidence is of little to no use.
Animals have been linked to similar illnesses in the past. In 2003, palm civets turned out to be an intermediate host for Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), and camels and intermediate host for Middle East Respieratory Syndrome (MERS) in 2012. In both outbreaks, researchers eventually found that the origin of the virus was in bats, where the virus could live without sickening the animals. The virus then seemed to have been transmitted to other animals, and then to humans.
Benjamin Neumann, chairman of the biology department at Texas A&M University, is one of the scientists who has been looking at the virus sequences in his lab. He said “while pangolins-associated viruses appear to be related to the novel coronavirus that is infecting people, it is not yet the smoking gun that tells us how 2019-nCov originated”,
It is still uncertain whether this potential link between the coronavirus and pangolins will be good of bad for the species. On the one hand, it may curb the trade in these extremely endangered animals, or it could cause a backlash.