Coronavirus: Bats, Snakes, Dog Meat to Blame.

A giant bat on sale in a Chinese market.

The Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan where live animals are sold, mostly for food or medicine is still believed to be the source of the virulent coronavirus.

The Chinese government on Sunday ordered a temporary ban of the wildlife trade until the epidemic is contained.

One undercover investigation found that a market in Guangdong was still selling the forbidden creatures by hiding them in tents.

A vendor in Xianning was found to be selling live barking deer and Chinese ferret-badgers.

It should be noted t some 56 million residents in the province had to be quarantined because of the fast-spreading illness.

Roasted rats are a delicacy in China.

According to the report by Chinese news outlet Southern Metropolis Daily, one seller in Baiyun District, Guangzhou was eager to offer wild snakes and bamboo rats to the journalist, who posed as a customer.

The man charged 300 yuan (£33) per kilogram for the snakes and 160 yuan (£18) per kilogram for the rats. This is why experts suspect the coronavirus may have crossed to humans from an animal host.

Experts believe that the deadly disease has been passed onto humans by wildlife sold as food, especially bats, wild rodents, snakes, deer, badgers and weasels in markets in Hubei Province, China.

A market vendor weighs python meat for a customer at a Chinese market.

Coronavirus is transmitted through the air and primarily infects the upper respiratory and gastrointestinal tract of mammals and birds.

The highly contagious illness was first reported in late December 2019 in Wuhan, a major city in central China, and has spread out to other countries, including the United States.

There are more than 7,700 confirmed cases of the virus which originated in Wuhan, and at least 170 deaths in China and Eighteen in other countries have confirmed according to the World Health Organization.

Masked Chinese passengers wait at a terminal in Wuhan Province.

As the new coronavirus spreads in China and around the world, scientists are scrambling to find out exactly where it came from.

Now, a new study published by a Trusted Source January 30, provides strong evidence to the virus' origins, and points to bats as the most likely hosts.

Bats have an unfortunate history of passing potentially deadly pathogens to human hosts.

Bat soup served at a Chinese restaurant.

Wei Ji and colleagues at Peking University in China compared the genomes of five samples of the new virus with 217 similar viruses collected from a range of species.

Their analysis suggests that the new virus looks similar to those found in bats, but is most like viruses seen in snakes, genetically speaking.

Wild food that includes bats and rats on display at a Chinese market.

“Results derived from our sequence analysis suggest for the first time that snakes are a most likely host,” they wrote.

“The new virus may have formed as a result of viruses from bats and snakes combining, which can happen when two types of animals are kept in close quarters, as can happen in food markets’’, says Peter Rabinowitz at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Scientists from the Chinese Center for Disease Control (CDC) and Prevention said tests proved humans caught it from animals at the Huanan Seafood Wholesales Market.

Unfortunately, there is no approved vaccine or antiviral treatment available for coronavirus infection.