The World Health Organization (WHO) announced the composition of its new Scientific Advisory Group on the Origin of New Pathogens (SAGO), in which the Cuban epidemiologist María Guzmán, along with 25 other experts, will have the mission of continuing to investigate how COVID-19 emerged, among other diseases.
Along with Guzmán, from the Pedro Kouri Institute of Tropical Medicine, there will be virologists, epidemiologists and other specialists from Brazil, USA, United Kingdom, Russia, France, Germany, China or Japan, among other countries.
Some of them work in institutions such as the University of Oxford, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States, the Pasteur Institute or the Brazilian Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, according to the list provided by the WHO.
The 26 members have yet to undergo a final evaluation, in which the WHO will also take into account public evaluations made of these candidates.
The committee has been formed not only to find the origin of the coronavirus that causes the COVID-19, for which a mission of experts from WHO and other organizations already traveled to China in February this year, but also to eventually investigate the causes of future dangerous pathogens.
“Understanding where these pathogens come from is essential to avoid future outbreaks with epidemic and pandemic potential,” said WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in a statement, who predicted that the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, the cause of COVID- 19, “will not be the last to emerge.”
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