Experts who travelled to China to probe the COVID-19 pandemic's origins called Wednesday for such international investigations to become standard practice following an outbreak to lessen the stigma.
"Why don't we do this with every outbreak, as a routine?" asked Marion Koopmans, a Dutch virologist who was a member of the World Health Organization mission to Wuhan earlier this year.
The UN health agency worked for months to send an international team to Wuhan to help determine how the novel coronavirus first jumped from animals to humans.
But in a tense geopolitical climate, the highly sensitive mission only landed on the ground this past January -- more than a year after the first cases were detected in the Chinese city in late 2019.
The independent experts, who spent four weeks in Wuhan visiting sites linked to early cases, wrapped up their mission last month without conclusive findings.
The team, which has stressed this was just a first stage in the process, is expected to publish a report with their full findings next week.
Speaking at a virtual event hosted by the Chatham House think-tank, several experts suggested China's reluctance to admit an international team was understandable given the broad misconception that they were going in to second-guess Beijing's own probe.
They stressed that their true mission had been to cooperate with Chinese counterparts and build on their findings.
- 'Good step' -
Koopmans said few countries would welcome international experts in such circumstances, "because it feels like people coming in and telling you you are not doing a good job."
But if international investigations of disease outbreaks were automatic, it would help remove the notion that they are a "punishment", she said.
"If we want to move beyond this sensitivity, let's just make it routine, standard."
British zoologist Peter Daszak, another team member, agreed that a more routine approach to addressing and preventing outbreaks and pandemics was needed.
He called for far more energy to go into forecasting where pandemics might emerge, in the same way countries work to predict other "existential threats" such as hurricanes or the likelihood of terror attacks.
Systematic monitoring was needed of areas where wildlife interacts with livestock and humans, for example.
The world should be working to "find out what threats are out there in wildlife that could emerge in the future, work out where they are... and disrupt that interface," Daszak said.