There was a dead lizard in the mail. But that wasn’t the unusual part. Australia’s wildlife “coroner”, forensic veterinary pathologist Dr Lydia Tong, performs hundreds of autopsies on native and exotic animals each year, many of them from zoos; others, as with this shingleback lizard, the victim of a multibillion-dollar global trade gone wrong.The reptile had its own unusual traveller – a parasite never before seen in a shingleback.
As people push farther and farther into the last wild places, diseases previously unknown to humanity are making the leap across species lines. Vet and epidemiologist Dr Jon Epstein says habitat loss, global travel and a persistent appetite for wild animals have created a “perfect storm” for the next human pandemic. And Asia's infamous wet markets – where both the deadly 2003 SARS outbreak and this coronavirus are thought to have started – remain ground zero.
By New Year's Day, the entire market had been shuttered under quarantine in scenes eerily reminiscent of the SARS crisis. For scientists such as Epstein, who have been monitoring wild diseases ever since, it wasn't a surprise.More than 70 per cent of all new diseases emerging in humans are thought to have been caught from animals, some of which, such as bats and rodents, might have lived with the viruses for thousands of years.
It's what biologist Professor Diana Bell calls "the speed-dating of diseases", where animals under intense stress shed their viruses faster and have fewer immune defences against new ones. Their slaughter is often bloody, done by hand with knives in the middle of the market, amplifying the risk to humans. If a vendor already has a cut on their hand or touches their nose or mouth, they can be infected.
Since then bats have been implicated in ongoing outbreaks of the deadly Ebola virus in Africa, sometimes directly or via infected gorilla carcasses brought back from the jungle, and in the case of the coronavirus MERS , through camels. Disease hunters such as Epstein, along with researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, have continued to monitor wild bat populations for the past 15 years through the group EcoHealth Alliance.
For organised crime, the trade in protected species is an enticing slice of the black market - worth at least $22 billion each year globally but still largely under-policed. And demand is growing fast alongside middle-class wealth in developing Asian countries. The main corridor of trade, South-east Asia, includes China, Indonesia, Vietnam, Laos and Myanmar, with China still the biggest market, having outlawed the consumption of protected species only in recent years.
It would be quite poetic for the human race’s demise to have been a consequence of its treatment of animals.
So sad, that animals can't be left alone to do what they do best.. survive in the wild.
Really good article. Thank you.
Wildlife market
Is the pangolin, world's most trafficked mammal, part of the new coronavirus jigsaw? Biggest demand for pangolin products including their scales are from China & Vietnam.
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