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    View: It's time for humans to stop living voraciously

    Synopsis

    China’s crackdown in 2003 on wildlife markets ended after Sars exited. History is repeating itself, this time while the Covid-19 pandemic is raging. Clearly, Chinese authorities have so long blessed the breed-and-kill industry as some sort of get-rich-quick cultural entitlement that it won’t evaporate by fiat.

    Dog---ANIANI
    Seizures of smuggled species and products in Europe and the US both reveal and mask the scale of the global collusion in wildlife trafficking, which rakes in $7 billion to $23 billion yearly.
    The chorus is growing. United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity’s acting executive secretary Elizabeth Maruma Mrema, many leading infectious diseases experts, and 241 conservation groups have demanded worldwide bans on wet markets. Are overt and covert patrons of the wildlife trade listening?

    As we’ve learned the hard way, wet markets don’t just sell seafood and domesticated animals. They also hawk wildlife, possible hosts of potentially deadly pathogens. Believed to have spawned the severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) and the novel coronavirus (Sars-CoV-2), these germ-incubators are reportedly reopening in China, despite a late-February ban on illegal wildlife trade.

    China’s crackdown in 2003 on wildlife markets ended after Sars exited. History is repeating itself, this time while the Covid-19 pandemic is raging. Clearly, Chinese authorities have so long blessed the breed-and-kill industry as some sort of get-rich-quick cultural entitlement that it won’t evaporate by fiat.

    But while beating back the latest enemy virus, China’s corona-warriors miss one point. Killer pathogens aren’t easily vanquished, least of all by countries left no wiser by serial ravages of zoonotic disease: HIV-Aids, Sars, the Middle East respiratory syndrome (Mers) and ebola, to name a few.

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    Research on Sars-CoV-2 is ongoing. Said to have evolved by natural selection, the virus broadly resembles coronaviruses in bats, its suspected reservoir, and pangolins, a possible but yet-unconfirmed intermediate host. It may have gone from bats to humans via an animal go-between, pre-adapting to infect humans. Or it turned pathogenic post-jump, during unsuspected human-to-human spread. If the first hypothesis is true, there’s greater risk of recurring outbreaks.

    From a public health standpoint, illegal trade isn’t the only headache. China plans to monitor ‘legal’ wildlife trade when (read: if) its ban becomes law. When a measure stops wildlife consumption but allows non-food uses like medicine, fur and leather, you can bet the exemptions will be misused. Wildlife for fur or medicine will appear on the black market as food. And breeders will tag poached animals as farm-bred.

    The legal-illegal distinction is laughably flimsy, anyway. Eating wildlife endangers human health. So do breeding, handling and slaughter in, say, abysmally regulated fur farms. Wherever terrorised, immunologically weakened animals bite, scratch, salivate, urinate, defecate and bleed around their human handlers, interspecies viral spillovers may occur. Wherever they land up, wild-caught animals may harbour pathogens acquired before capture.

    Traditional Chinese medicine farms are dicey too. Pangolin scales are prized for ‘medicinal value’. But pangolins are severely endangered. Plus, they may be Sars-CoV-2’s host, akin to Sars-related civet cats or Mers-linked camels. Their harvesting is indefensible on both counts. But try convincing Chinese health officials who prescribe medicines containing bear bile for Covid-19 patients.

    Experts say bats should especially exit from lunch menus, as should bat faeces and body parts from lists of medicinal ingredients. These flying mammals with formidable immune systems safely harbour microbes that can turn vicious inside less-resistant hosts. Many killer diseases spring from bat-borne pathogens: rabies from lyssaviruses, Marburg and ebola from filoviruses, Nipah and Hendra from henipaviruses, and Sars and Mers from coronaviruses.

    Warning that disturbing bat habitats boosts the chances of zoonosis, researchers decry habitat and biodiversity loss in general. Human takeover of land and forests endangers species while escalated human-animal encounters facilitate pathogenic spillovers, whether in wildlife markets or meat factories. Meantime, deforestation and climate change help spread vector-borne blights like malaria and dengue. None of this is a secret.

    Yet, global resolve to protect biodiversity and promote animal welfare seems weak, since everybody has a stake in plundering nature and its non-human progeny. Live animal markets thrive across Asia and Africa where initiatives that hit livelihoods, even to save lives, are generally unpopular. On their part, developed countries have neither done enough to nab the illegal wildlife trade’s transit-providers, nor fully avowed the equally alarming health and ecological costs of mega-scale factory farming.

    Seizures of smuggled species and products in Europe and the US both reveal and mask the scale of the global collusion in wildlife trafficking, which rakes in $7 billion to $23 billion yearly. Animals are unlawfully hunted on every continent. Bushmeat and body parts sell clandestinely in London, Paris and New York. Primates or pangolins, reptiles or raccoons, rhino horn or ivory, tiger bones or leopard skins, there are takers everywhere.

    With wildlife’s eye-popping prices, greed, vanity and corruption fuel this tentacular business that brutalises countless species, pushing many to near-extinction. As for livestock, countless sentient beings become antibiotics-laced meat in the high-speed assembly lines and kill floors of industrialised slaughter, potential nurseries of untreatable superbugs.

    Unsurprisingly, around two-thirds of emerging infectious diseases affecting humans are animal-related, three-fourths of them wildlife-linked. Virologists also reckon animals and birds might host 1.67 million yet-unearthed viruses, of which as many as 827,000 could afflict humans.

    Debuting stealthily and killing expeditiously, Sars-CoV-2 ups the zoonotic ante. Able to spread asymptomatically, it has wrecked social bonds, paralysed economies and strained health services. Placing a globalised world under an unthinkable lockdown, it offers a preview of the chaos pathogenic mutations and spillovers might unleash in future.

    The message for us is clear: stop living voraciously — or, rest assured, nature will strike back.


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