China's exotic farms may be a missing link behind the pandemic's leap to people
The civet farm was a converted pigsty, Peter Li says, describing a pre-pandemic visit to one of China’s then numerous small businesses specializing in breeding wild animals for meat. About 10 civets, wild animals with long, furry tails and face markings like a raccoon’s, lived penned together for eight to 12 months before being sold, says Li, the China policy specialist at Humane Society International and a professor of East Asian politics at the University of Houston-Downtown. With wild animals housed closely together and often in unsanitary conditions, he says, the potential for disease spread is great.
Eventually, high-end restaurateurs likely used some of the civets—considered a delicacy by some in China—as an ingredient in a pricey soup that also includes snake meat.
Before the pandemic, such farms kept China’s wildlife markets stocked with live animals—civets, bamboo rats, crocodiles, porcupines, and snakes, among others—primarily for sale to restaurants. The small farms, promoted by government officials as a way to reduce poverty in rural areas with few other job opportunities, numbered in the thousands and employed millions of people. But by the end of 2020, the government said it had shuttered all these farms as part of its response to the novel coronavirus.
Now, a World Health Organization (WHO) team is considering if wildlife farms may be a missing link that helped the coronavirus jump from its probable host animals—bats—to humans at Wuhan's Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, a site connected to a cluster of the earliest human infections. (The team is also investigating possible links to another market in Wuhan that was tied to an early patient with no connection to Huanan.)
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/chinas-exotic-wildlife-farms-may-be-a-possible-missing-link-behind-the-pandemics-leap-to-people 179424
= new reply since forum marked as read
