Amid the bustle of a traditional produce market in southern China’s Guangxi province, a small menagerie surrounded New York-based disease ecologist Peter Daszak: sacks of toads, piles of salamanders, snakes, alligators, nocturnal mammals called civets, herons, and more. “There were hundreds of different species,” he recalls. “The diversity was incredible.”
Used in traditional cuisine and for medicine, the array of meats is in constant demand, and is frequently procured by trapping these animals in the wild. Earlier this year, Daszak and colleagues of his from EcoHealth Alliance were in the region hunting cryptic diversity: pathogens in these animals that are primed to enter human populations when the meat is handled or consumed.
In late 2002, a mysterious virus—the cause of an atypical pneumonia that would later be named severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS)—emerged in the human population, likely from an animal source in southern China. The previously unknown coronavirus sickened more than 8,000 people and killed more than 700 in more than 35 countries across the globe. Researchers tracking the epidemic found that a high proportion of the earliest cases occurred in people who had handled wild animals used as food. None were farmers, but seven were chefs at restaurants where several animal species were slaughtered on the premises; one sold snakes at a produce market; and another purchased meat at such markets for restaurants. The SARS coronavirus or viruses very closely related to it were also found in palm civets, raccoon dogs, bats, and other wild mammals (Emerg Infect Dis, doi:10.3201/eid1006.030852, 2004).
To better understand the disease risk posed by eating or handling wild-caught animals, Daszak and other EcoHealth Alliance researchers have recently embarked on a project in Guangxi, Guangdong, and several other provinces in China. The group aims to identify pathogens in blood, fecal, and other samples from wild animals in the region and estimate the risks they pose to human health. In the process, they are also working with farmers who have begun to captive-breed wildlife.