The Covid-19 pandemic focuses global attention yet again on how new pathogens emerge from illegal wildlife markets for live animals, meat and body parts – this latest virus thought to have originated in a wildlife market in Wuhan, China, possibly from bats and/or pangolins.
Despite an increasing number of zoonotic diseases that have jumped the species barrier from animals to humans -- from SARS and MERS to HIV and Ebola -- and taken millions of lives over the last 40 years, wildlife trafficking continues unabated.
Prominent scientists and conservationists have been sounding the alarm for years over the connection between eating wild and farmed animals, and the predictable emergence of new pathogens. Will Covid-19 be the wake-up call needed to finally stop at least the wildlife trafficking that has helped deliver the global catastrophe that is currently raging?
The pandemic is forcing governments in China and Southeast Asia to re-examine long held cultural practices and temporarily close “wet markets” that house, slaughter and sell wildlife that are contributing to the spread of new diseases.
Professor Kate Jones, chair of ecology and biodiversity at University College London, told The Guardian that emerging animal-borne infectious diseases are an “increasing and very significant threat to global health, security and economies.”
The multi-billion-dollar illegal wildlife trade cuts a wide swath of destruction through threatened species with animal abuse, cruelty, slaughter and smuggling as well as enabling new pathogens that threaten human health. These animals are being trafficked and eaten into extinction.
“Our too close relationship with wild animals in the markets or when we use them for entertainment has unleashed the terror and misery of new viruses,” says Dr. Jane Goodall, famed primatologist and conservationist. “Viruses that exist in animals without harming them mutate into other forms to infect us with new diseases like Ebola, SARS, MERS and now the coronavirus.”
Covid-19, the latest virus to jump the species barrier from animals to humans. Photo: The CDC
Goodall says that human population growth, the invasion of wild animal habitats, closer contact with animals eaten for food or trafficked globally have increased the risk that viruses “cross the species barrier and jump from wild animals to people.”
“Our western greedy lifestyle is demanding more and more from the natural resources of Africa, Asia and Latin America. This is damaging ecosystems, the relatively delicate balance between different life forms and apparently allowing these viruses to pass more easily from animals to humans.”
And it is not just wildlife trafficking that is the problem. There is already substantial scientific evidence documenting the links between pathogens and both wild and farmed animals, and how they periodically but regularly, move from animals to humans with deadly results.
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says that “three out of every four new emerging diseases in people come from animals.” Scientists say that viruses and bacteria are moving targets, constantly mutating, combining and adapting in ways that make it much more difficult to track and develop vaccines.
“Markets for wild animals as food or medicinals, and the continual intensification of factory farming, function as incubators for new diseases. Some have been much more lethal to humans who contract them than has COVID-19. And new diseases are emerging from these sources at accelerating rates,” warns ecologist Carl Safina.
For example, some of the viral origins of H1N1 Swine flu in 2009, that killed hundreds of thousands of people globally, were traced to the US factory farm system. African Swine Flu that is killing or has led to the killing of hundreds of millions of pigs in China and Southeast Asia does not affect humans. But, with mutating viruses, how long will this last?
Covid-19 gives us all the opportunity to re-examine and change our relationship with animals, both wild and farmed. Stopping or at least limiting wildlife trafficking and eating animals could help prevent the next deadly global outbreak.
“The silver lining is that this pandemic might stop the awful trading of wild animals for meats and traditional medicine, that’s the hope,” Goodall says.
For more on the Jane Goodall Institute’s Forever Wild campaign designed to stop wildlife trafficking, see our April 4 newsletter.
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