The DNA of the virus from the African swine fever epidemic in Barcelona suggests that the pathogen is present in the laboratory of the Generalitat of Catalonia, according to the first conclusions of the report presented last March by the scientific team under the direction of the Council of Agriculture, Livestock and Fisheries, during a meeting with the means of communication. Genetic analyzes carried out by the Government show that the wild boar virus has a high number of mutations compared to laboratory pathogens, a characteristic which does not correspond to the hypothesis of an escape. They are strains of the same virus, but apparently separated by years of evolution, not days, according to the scientists who carried out the comparison, led by Toni Gabaldón, of the Instituto de Investigación Biomédica de Barcelona, a center founded by the Generalitat and the University of Barcelona.
The results are “not conclusive,” pending parallel analyzes at the Central Veterinary Laboratory of the Ministry of Agriculture, in the Madrid city of Algete, according to Gabaldón. The scientist further warned that all the material at the Centro de Investigación en Sanidad Animal (CReSA), located in the heart of the brote, in Bellaterra (Barcelona), has not yet been analyzed. 19 samples have been studied and others are missing, frozen for five years and considered somewhat suspicious.
After the presentation of the results, the Council of Agriculture, Agriculture and Fisheries, Òscar Ordeig, asked in a “cautious” press not to determine the origin of the germ and for this reason the Generalitat ordered the analysis of 553 wild boars. Ordeig expressed concern about the health situation that the Catalan agri-food sector will face next year and which could affect its productivity. At the market level, this confirmed that 80% of markets accepted the regionalization of exports.
The first corpse of an infected jabalí appeared on November 25 a few hundred meters from CReSA, a Generalitat bunker which, at the same time, was carrying out experiments with the pathogen to try to develop a vaccine. During the first days when the virus, eradicated from Spain since 1994, was implanted, it was able to reach contaminated foreign foods, and the Ministry of Agriculture itself launched the hypothesis of an escape from the laboratory on December 5. Gabaldón’s team compared the pathogen’s DNA from infected wild boars in Barcelona with the genetic material of 800 other similar viruses available in international databases, finding no coincidence. The Bellaterra virus belongs to a new group, unknown until its closure.
Around forty agents of the Mossos d’Esquadra and the Civil Guard registered the CReSA on December 18, by order of the investigating court number 2 of Cerdanyola del Vallès, which is investigating the origin of the germ. Preliminary analyzes of the wild boar virus’s DNA showed it was “very similar,” according to the ministry, to the strain that arrived in Georgia from Southeast Africa in 2007, triggering the current crisis in Europe’s pig sector. The hypothesis of the leak seemed obvious: a virus eradicated 30 years earlier in Spain reappeared in a laboratory which was already carrying out experiments precisely with the Georgia strain from 2007, which did not exist in nature. However, the president of the Generalitat himself, the socialist Salvador Illa, and his advisor Òscar Ordeig. He insisted these days that there were “no clues” pointing to CReSA. The big question continues: how could I have transmitted the virus to the first jabali?
The CReSA, in addition, has been under construction since September, a factor that could facilitate the escape of pathogens, as happened in the English town of Pirbright, where damaged tuberculosis in high-security laboratories caused the escape of the foot-and-mouth disease virus in 2007. The Catalan center has a biocontainment unit of 4,500 square meters, with six biosafety level 3 laboratories, it is necessary to manage dangerous viruses like African swine fever, which is deadly to wildlife. wild boars and boars. On September 15, CReSA began land preparation works to expand the high security laboratory area by 3,000 square meters. The institution acknowledged an incident recorded during the work ―a occasional cut in the gas supply―, but assures that the tasks carried out so far have not been affected by biosecurity.
CReSA facilities were “adapted to work safely with the virus,” according to the findings of an external audit last week, coordinated by veterinarian Laura Pérez, head of biological safety at the Centro de Investigación en Sanidad Animal, another laboratory that investigates dangerous pathogens in search of new treatments and vaccines, in the Madrid municipality of Valdeolmos.
Certifying the cause of an epidemic is not easy, as we demonstrated in 2020 with the Covid pandemic, which killed more than seven million people. A team of three decades of scientific advisers to the World Health Organization (WHO) presented its report on June 27 on the possible origins of the coronavirus, without reaching any definitive conclusion due to the opacity of the Chinese dictatorship. “As things stand, we should not rule out any hypothesis, including zoonotic jump (from animals to humans) or escape from the laboratory,” said Ethiopian biologist Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO director-general. “We continue to call on China and any other country with information on the origins of Covid to share it openly, in order to protect the world from future pandemics,” he said.
The head of the CReSA biocontainment unit, virologist Xavier Abad, issued a warning on his social networks on November 14. “Accidents in laboratories or in facilities that manage existing pathogens,” he warned, regarding bacteria escaping air. Tweezer from a vaccine factory in Lanzhou (China), which caused more than 10,000 cases of brucellosis among nearby residents in 2019. A little more than 10 days after this alert from Abad, the first infected wild boar appeared a few meters from the laboratory where the virus was tested. The work of forestry scientists, soldiers, police and other officials has succeeded in producing, for the moment, soils affecting 29 wild boars in the original intervention area, without moving on to pig farms.
China lost almost 1% of its gross domestic product following an epidemic in 2018: around 100 billion euros, according to a calculation by economists at Wuhan University. Confirmation of a CReSA virus escape would lead to demands for compensation worth millions of dollars from the Spanish pork sector, which exports around 9 billion euros each year.
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