Bushmeat may be the cause of a global pandemic. The line
between wild and domestic is being crossed on a commercial basis and the
results could be a disaster.
To understand why WHO
worries about them, consider the example of the influenza virus H5N1. Between
2003 and 2014, this RNA virus, which causes bird flu, infected some 600 people,
killing more than half of them. Though the current known strains of virus can
kill, they do not have the capacity to pass from one human to another. This is
what, according to WHO, keeps most cases of H5N1 restricted to directly
spilling over from a host reservoir, mainly wild ducks, into humans.
But a 2012 study in
ferrets showed how easily this flu virus could acquire mutations that would
enable it to pass from one mammal to another. Scientists at the Erasmus Medical
Center in the Netherlands transferred H5N1 virus from the nose of one ferret to
another and then to another. They repeated this ten times, and, at the end of
the experiment, through mere random mutation and replication, the virus had
acquired the ability to transfer from ferret to ferret without any more help
from the scientists.
All wild meat is
dangerous to some extent.But some wild meats are a
lot more dangerous than others. Tropical forests are home to a much higher
number of species than other kinds of forest, which means their inhabitants can
carry more kinds of disease-causing microbes than wild animals in other parts
of the world. Bushmeat in Africa has been shown to be the source of scourges
such as HIV and, more recently, the 2014 Ebola outbreak, which sent a chill
down the spines of epidemic experts.
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