Coronavirus: Illegal food markets still selling wild animals despite ban over fears of new epidemics
"Wet animal markets" in Asia, where the novel coronavirus is believed to have originated, are reportedly still operating under the protection of organized crime gangs.
An undercover investigation by '60 Minutes Australia' journalist Liam Bartlett in Bangkok, Thailand, revealed how several wild “high risk” animals were still being sold in wet markets, despite Asian governments claiming they had been shut down following the Covid-19 outbreak, The Sun reports.
Bartlett was joined by environmental and human rights investigator Steven Galster, who warned the wet market has the potential to spark a "second Wuhan." China acknowledged it needed to regulate its lucrative wildlife industry to prevent another outbreak, closing over 20,000 wet markets in February. However, crime syndicates across Asia are still running wet markets with impunity.
According to the report, markets trading “exotic meat” and wildlife are still operational in Indonesia, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, and Burma. And speaking of the Chatuchak weekend market in Bangkok, wild animals from across the world are still being smuggled in for their live and slaughtered sale.
The 60 Minutes investigation showed several exotic animals being sold for consumption in the open. Covert footage showed African serval cats, fennec foxes from the Sahara, marmosets from South America, blue-tongued lizards, iguanas, monkeys, Australian cockatoos, African meerkats, ferrets, rare tortoises, porcupines, snakes, as well as skunks for sale, per the report.
Considering, these animals are highly vulnerable to catching and passing on viruses owing to their diminished immune systems caused by the stress of living in torturous conditions.
In turn, this adds to the risk of viruses like Covid-19 passing on to humans when the animals are manually handled and slaughtered for sale. What's more? The risk of the virus being transmitted to humans becomes even higher considering thousands of people visit such markets each day.
According to Galster, wet animal markets across Asia are a "sleeping time bomb" of the coronavirus threat.
“I think this place is a torture chamber and a filthy laboratory all mixed into one," Galster said as he walked through the Chatuchak market with 60 Minutes. “With literally thousands of people [at the market], it's the perfect storm for the Wuhan thing to happen again right here."
According to him, several environmental rights teams have urged Thailand to shut the markets down. Nonetheless, he is now calling on authorities to crackdown against crime gangs that run the illicit animal trades.
"If you want to stop the next pandemic, it's going to have to be truly a global attempt to shut these markets down," Galster said. "Coronavirus is spreading all over the world. We need to not just shut down the markets in China, you need to shut them down in other places too. Otherwise, it's going to expand or recur."
Bartlett also spoke with Professor Gabrel Leung, the chair of public health medicine at Hong Kong University who spearheaded the SARS response.
According to Leung, the coronavirus could infect over 60% of the world's population as it is “certainly more infective (than SARS), and it’s also very difficult to try to control it.”
Even as an expert on the disease, Leung said he's unable to understand “how big is the iceberg," adding that he believes many more people are infected than the official global numbers. Since the outbreak, the virus has infected over 106,000 and caused nearly 3,600 deaths as of Monday morning.
However, Leung has warned we "have to prepare" for a second wave of the outbreak. If millions of people become infected going by the current rate of transmission, it could “bring about another massive instance of health inequity” that only wealthy countries with state-of-the-art health systems would be able to survive.