According to the last minute information; Chinese scientists announced that 'pangolin, which is a mammalian species and is illegally traded for meat, may be a coronavirus carrier.
The deadly coronavirus outbreak in China may have spread from bats to people through the illegal traffic of 'pangolins', the world's only scaly mammals used for food and medicine in Asia.
Despite Reuters' report, although protected by international law, the pangolin is one of Asia's most trafficked mammals, because its meat is considered a delicacy in countries like China, and its scales are used in traditional medicine in world medicine.
"This latest discovery will be of great importance for the prevention and control of the virus (virus)," said South China Agricultural University, who led the research, in a statement on its website.
It is believed that the epidemic, which killed 636 people on the mainland of China, started in Wuhan city, Hubei province, in a market selling live wild animals.
China's official Xinhua news agency stated that the new coronavirus genome sequence, separated from the pangolins in the study, is 99 percent identical to infected people and that pangolins are "the most likely intermediate host".
But Dirk Pfeiffer, a veterinary medicine professor at the City University of Hong Kong, warned that the study is a very long way to prove that pangolins carry the virus.