A new coronavirus spreading from the city of Wuhan has put a spotlight on China’s poorly regulated wild animal trade – driven by relentless demand for exotic delicacies and ingredients for traditional medicine.
China’s markets, where wild and often poached animals are packed together, have been described as a breeding ground for disease and an incubator for a multitude of viruses to evolve and jump the species barrier to humans.
“The origin of the new coronavirus is the wildlife sold illegally in a Wuhan seafood market,” Gao Fu, director of China Center for Disease Control and Prevention, told a briefing.
Preliminary research suggested that in the most recent stage of its evolution, the Wuhan virus was passed on to humans from snakes. But Chinese government medical adviser Zhong Nanshan has also identified badgers and rats as possible sources.
Conservationists and health experts have long denounced the trade in wildlife for its impact on biodiversity and the potential for spreading disease in markets.
“The animal welfare part of this is obvious, but much more hidden is this stashing and mixing of all these species together in a very small area, with secretions and urine mixed up together,” said Christian Walzer, executive director of the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society.
China’s wet markets have already been blamed for outbreaks of other infectious diseases in China and southeast Asia, including the virus responsible for Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), which killed nearly 800 people worldwide in 2003.
“The other thing you have to consider is that these animals are massively stressed in these cages so their immune systems fail very quickly,” said Walzer.
Since the outbreak began, authorities in Wuhan and elsewhere have shut down markets, zoos and forest parks, suspended trade in live poultry and the trade and transport of wild animals, though residents in some areas said the measures appeared to be largely symbolic.