How to Stop the Next Global Outbreak at Its Source
China’s demand for wildlife needs to be treated as a public health threat.
Check out those scales.
Photographer: Jimin Lai/AFP/Getty Images
The search for the source of the novel coronavirus has tabbed a new animal candidate: the pangolin, a long-snouted, scaly, ant-eating mammal found in parts of Asia and Africa. Scientists in Guangzhou, China, announced data last week suggesting that the notoriously cute animals, valued as a source of food and as a traditional medicinal ingredient in China, carried viruses that are 99% similar to the virus now named Covid-19.
That data has been neither published nor confirmed, but the mere suggestion is turning attention back to China’s wet markets and the wild animals for sale in many of them. Since December, evidence has strongly suggested that something wild infected humans with the virus at one such market in central Wuhan, leading to the current outbreak.