Bat faeces, linked to coronavirus outbreak in humans, available on Amazon and delivered to the UK

“We were not aware this was listed,” he said, of the advert on Amazon. “Our staff member was new and was not aware this was a problem. We have removed the whole listing and destroyed all the product. We got it a long time ago from a supplier in the UK.” The business is based in Northamptonshire. The Telegraph has chosen not to identify the company which operates from a housing estate.

A spokesman for Amazon, meanwhile, said the website requires all products offered in their store to comply with applicable laws and regulations, and that the website “proactively monitors multiple sources for safety notifications, including from regulatory agencies and healthcare organisations”.

The Covid outbreak, which began in Wuhan, China, late last year, has been repeatedly linked to bats. Analysis of the first 41 Covid-19 patients in medical journal the Lancet found that 27 of them had direct exposure to the Huanan seafood market, in Wuhan. But the same analysis found that the first known case of the illness did not.

Professor Stephen Turner, head of the department of microbiology at Melbourne’s Monash University, said this week that it is most likely but inconclusive that the virus originated in bats.

Matthew Henderson, director of the Asia Studies Centre at the Henry Jackson Society and a former British diplomat based in China, also told the Telegraph: “Even those same experts have been photographed handling bats and bat droppings with utter disregard for biosecurity, and have even boasting about getting covered in bat urine or sprayed with bat blood.

“Even if viruses and bacteria are killed by drying the bat dung; at some point in the production of this so-called ‘medicine’, humans will have been exposed to infection while scooping wet droppings in humid  bat caves, where Chinese research has proved that many different strains of coronavirus are continually mutating and combining.”