First Sars, now the Wuhan coronavirus. Here’s why China should ban its wildlife trade forever
- Both coronaviruses are linked to live animal markets, where sick, injured and dying animals are sold as exotic foods but end up transmitting disease
- For too long, wildlife traders have been allowed to hide behind empty claims of medicine or conservation. It’s time to ban the unsavoury trade permanently
The deadly coronavirus, 2019-nCoV, has paralysed Wuhan and plunged China into a state of emergency. Sweeping across Chinese provinces, municipalities and special administrative regions, the epidemic has killed at least 106 people in the country.
With the death toll and number of infections climbing, this is turning into a major global public health crisis, similar to that caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) in 2003. People infected with the 2019-nCoV have been found in countries across North America, Europe, Southeast and South Asia.
The first group of Wuhan’s 2019-nCoV patients were mostly traders at the market; one early patient had never visited it. The wet market had a section selling some 120 wildlife animals across 75 species. The first group of Wuhan patients is similar to the first group of Sars patients, who were also traders of wildlife in Guangdong.
China should shut down live food markets to stop another virus outbreak
Bears in the wild have dropped by 93.4 per cent since the 1980s when bear farming began. Chinese wildlife traders now venture overseas for wildlife and their body parts. What Chinese customs manages to intercept is just the tip of the iceberg.
China’s wildlife markets have become a hotbed for diseases. Animals that are sick, dying of illness or injured during their capture and transport are not food, but health hazards. The workers who handle, kill and process the animals are vulnerable to viruses through cuts on their skin. The secretions of infected snakes can be aerosolised and breathed in by workers and shoppers alike.
Wildlife trade hurts rather than benefits China. Exotic foods constitute a mere fraction of the country’s 4.2 trillion yuan (US$605 billion) catering industry. Bear bile and other wildlife ingredients of traditional Chinese medicine are not life-saving drugs.
Why wild animals are a key ingredient in China’s coronavirus outbreak
The just-issued trade ban should not be a temporary measure. It should be made a lasting policy. China has to choose between the narrow interests of wildlife businesses and the national interest of public health. It cannot allow a minority of wildlife traders and exotic food lovers to hijack the public interest of the entire nation.
Peter J. Li, PhD is associate professor of East Asian politics at the University of Houston-Downtown and a China policy specialist at Humane Society International