Exotic meat sales are a “huge economy” risking pandemics

Karin Brulliard of the Washington Post reports that late last year, a horseshoe bat coronavirus is thought to have leaped in China,

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scientists say, where commerce in exotic animals is driven by luxury tastes in game and demand for parts used for medicinal purposes.

 At a “wet market” in Wuhan linked to an early cluster of coronavirus cases, at least one store sold creatures including wolf cubs and masked palm civets for consumption. Such markets, experts say, feature stressed and ill animals stacked in cages, bodily fluids sprinkling down, as well as butchering — prime conditions for viral spillover…
“One of the key interfaces for these spillover events to occur are markets and the international trade of wildlife,” Chris Walzer, executive director for the Wildlife Conservation Society’s global health program, told reporters on Thursday.
In Africa, dwindling populations of large mammals mean game is increasingly from smaller species, including rodents and bats, said Fabian Leendertz, a veterinarian who studies zoonotic diseases at the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin. While some is consumed for subsistence or traditional purposes, exotic meat sales are also a “huge economy” in the fast-growing megacities, Leendertz said...
“That’s something I would stop first,” he said. “The risk is not because the meat travels … but it results in higher hunting pressure and higher contact rate for those who go hunting and those who take it apart
Lyme disease, caused by a bacteria, spreads more easily in the eastern United States because fragmented forests have fewer predators, such as foxes and opossums, that eat mice that host Lyme-spreading ticks, studies have found. Building leads to a closer coexistence with some wild animals, including bats, Leendertz said.”1

These scientists warn unless humans change how we interact with wildlife, the next pandemic is already on the way.

Reference

1(2020, April 3). The next pandemic is already coming, unless humans change .... Retrieved April 4, 2020, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2020/04/03/coronavirus-wildlife-environment/