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-http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/77137858.cms
Vietnam has banned the import of wildlife and wildlife products to reduce the risk of new pandemics.
The move also bans wildlife markets for such items, including online sales.
The origins of the current Covid-19 pandemic are thought to lie in the wildlife trade, with the disease emerging in bats and jumping to people via another, as yet unidentified, species, which could include rats, civets and pangolins.
Zoonotic diseases - which jump from animals to humans - are increasing and will continue to do so without action to protect wildlife and preserve the environment, UN experts have warned.
They blame the rise in diseases such as Covid-19 on high demand for animal protein, unsustainable agricultural practices and climate change.
Neglected zoonotic diseases kill two million people a year, they say.
Leading US biologist Thomas Lovejoy says to stop future outbreaks we need more respect for natural world
The vast illegal wildlife trade and humanity’s excessive intrusion into nature is to blame for the coronavirus pandemic, according to a leading US scientist who says “this is not nature’s revenge, we did it to ourselves”.
Scientists are discovering two to four new viruses are created every year as a result of human infringement on the natural world, and any one of those could turn into a pandemic, according to Thomas Lovejoy, who coined the term “biological diversity” in 1980 and is often referred to as the godfather of biodiversity.
“This pandemic is the consequence of our persistent and excessive intrusion in nature and the vast illegal wildlife trade, and in particular, the wildlife markets, the wet markets, of south Asia and bush meat markets of Africa… It’s pretty obvious, it was just a matter of time before something like this was going to happen,” said Lovejoy, a senior fellow at the United Nations Foundation and professor of environment science at George Mason University.
Pandemics such as coronavirus are the result of humanity’s destruction of nature, according to leaders at the UN, WHO and WWF International, and the world has been ignoring this stark reality for decades.
The illegal and unsustainable wildlife trade as well as the devastation of forests and other wild places were still the driving forces behind the increasing number of diseases leaping from wildlife to humans, the leaders told the Guardian.
A WWF report, also published on Wednesday, warns: “The risk of a new [wildlife-to-human] disease emerging in the future is higher than ever, with the potential to wreak havoc on health, economies and global security.”
Increased contact with animals likely cause of outbreaks such as Covid-19, say experts, as conservationists call for global ban on wildlife markets
the WWF released a report on the increasing global occurrence of zoonotic diseases, those that jump from animals to humans. “The increase in zoonotic outbreaks is a symptom of a broken relationship between humans and nature, and is likely to worsen,” the report said. In the last 30 years, about 60-70% of new infectious diseases that have emerged came from animals. About three to four new diseases every year. And India itself has seen the occurrence of at least 15, including Covid-19.
In order to prevent future pandemics, we need to change our relationship with wildlife
So what does that mean exactly?
The problem is that when we handle or come into close contact with wildlife, we run the risk of a spillover of the pathogens – viruses, bacteria, parasites, and fungi – that they host. While the pathogens don't make the creatures themselves ill, humans do not have the same immunity, and thus, can become sick.
-https://www.treehugger.com/how-stop-pandemics-3-steps-4847383
An estimated 650,000 to 840,000 unknown viral species capable of infecting humans lurk in wildlife. At the same time, population growth, urbanization, globalization, climate change, the relentless destruction of wildlife habitats and the harvesting of wild species have brought these viruses in closer contact with humans than ever before. Pandemics may become the new normal.
Also called zoonoses, zoonotic diseases are the many kinds of illnesses that pass from animals to humans. Almost 16% of all deaths worldwide can be attributed to infectious diseases, and zoonoses account for 60% of known infectious diseases and 75% of emerging infectious diseases, according to the National Institutes of Health.
Large-scale conversion of tracts of land for agriculture; trade and consumption of high-risk wild species are the two main drivers of zoonotic diseases, according to a report by Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) released on Wednesday. Zoonotic diseases are viral infections that are transmissible from vertebrate animals to humans.
The scientists found that the RBD portion of the SARS-CoV-2 spike proteins had evolved to effectively target a molecular feature on the outside of human cells called ACE2, a receptor involved in regulating blood pressure. The SARS-CoV-2 spike protein was so effective at binding the human cells, in fact, that the scientists concluded it was the result of natural selection and not the product of genetic engineering.
This evidence for natural evolution was supported by data on SARS-CoV-2's backbone -- its overall molecular structure. If someone were seeking to engineer a new coronavirus as a pathogen, they would have constructed it from the backbone of a virus known to cause illness. But the scientists found that the SARS-CoV-2 backbone differed substantially from those of already known coronaviruses and mostly resembled related viruses found in bats and pangolins.
-https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/03/200317175442.htm
New evidence has emerged of a link between human exploitation of nature and pandemics. Close contact with wild animals through hunting, trade or habitat loss puts the world at increased risk of outbreaks of new diseases, say scientists. Coronavirus is thought to have originated in bats, with other wild animals, possibly pangolins, playing a role in transmission to humans.
Increased contact with animals likely cause of outbreaks such as Covid-19, say experts, as conservationists call for global ban on wildlife markets
World Health Organisation to permanently ban all wildlife markets around the globe in the wake of coronavirus pandemic and to take a highly precautionary approach to the wildlife trade. The aggravated risk to human health caused from close contact to wild animals in the wildlife trade and in entertainment can no longer be ignored.
Conspiracy theories are totally false. The genomic sequence of COVID-19 has been determined and it confirms that the virus belongs to the one that exists in nature. Coronaviruses are known to cause diseases in animals. SARS belonged to the same family as COVID-19. It was passed on to the civets from the bats and from there it spread to humans. COVID-19 is also supposed to have spread from bats.
Throughout history, wildlife has been an important source of infectious diseases transmissible to humans. Today, zoonoses with a wildlife reservoir constitute a major public health problem, affecting all continents. With time, more and more human pathogens are found to be of animal origin. Moreover, most emerging infectious diseases in humans are zoonoses. Wild animals seem to be involved in the epidemiology of most zoonoses and serve as major reservoirs for transmission of zoonotic agents to domestic animals and humans.
-https://savehumanity.jyot.in/resourcedoc/wildlife-as-source-of-zoonotic-dieseases.pdf
It is estimated that, globally, about one billion cases of illness and millions of death occur every year from zoonoses. Some 60% of emerging infectious diseases that are reported globally are zoonoses.
-https://savehumanity.jyot.in/resourcedoc/WHO-zoonotic-diseases.pdf
Human encroachment into animal habitats is increasing the risk of new infectious diseases such as Covid-19, a major new study has said.
The new coronavirus, which has traversed the globe to infect more than 1 million people, began like so many pandemics and outbreaks before: inside an animal. The virus’s original host was almost certainly a bat, scientists have said, as was the case with Ebola, SARS, MERS and lesser-known viruses such as Nipah and Marburg. HIV migrated to humans more than a century ago from a chimpanzee. Influenza A has jumped from wild birds to pigs to people. Rodents spread Lassa fever in West Africa. But the problem is not the animals, according to scientists who study the zoonotic diseases that pass between animals and humans. It’s us. Wild animals have always had viruses coursing through their bodies. But a global wildlife trade worth billions of dollars, agricultural intensification, deforestation and urbanization are bringing people closer to animals, giving their viruses more of what they need to infect us: opportunity. Most fail. Some succeed on small scales. Very few, like SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus, triumph, aided by a supremely interconnected human population that can transport a pathogen around the world on a jet in mere hours.
-https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2020/04/03/coronavirus-wildlife-environment/
Hunting, farming and the global move of people to cities has led to massive declines in biodiversity and increased the risk of dangerous viruses like COVID-19 spilling over from animals to humans, a major study has concluded. EURACTIV’s media partner, The Guardian, reports. In a paper that suggests the underlying cause of the present pandemic is likely to be increased human contact with wildlife, scientists from Australia and the US traced which animals were most likely to share pathogens with humans.
To prevent further outbreaks, the experts said, both global heating and the destruction of the natural world for farming, mining and housing have to end, as both drive wildlife into contact with people. 75% of all emerging infectious diseases come from wildlife. Andersen, executive director of the UN Environment Programme said, “Our continued erosion of wild spaces has brought us uncomfortably close to animals and plants that harbour diseases that can jump to humans.”
“We see the animals as infecting us, but the picture that’s coming from the study and other studies is we really go to the animals,” said Dr. Lambin. “We intrude on their habitats.”
-https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/09/climate/animals-humans-virus-covid.html
-https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/13/opinion/animal-cruelty-coronavirus.html
The novel coronavirus that sparked the Covid-19 pandemic is likely to have come from bats found in Asia, according to a new study by the University of Hong Kong. The university’s microbiology department created a group of cells that resembled the intestine of the Chinese horseshoe bat, a species found in China, India, Nepal and Vietnam, among others. Researchers were able to successfully infect the cell structure with the coronavirus, known as Sars-CoV-2 .Earlier research had found the bat species carried a virus like the one that causes severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) and which was similar to the novel coronavirus. The findings, taken together, meant “the Chinese horseshoe bat may really be the original host of this SARS-CoV-2”, microbiologist Dr Yuen Kwok-yung, who co-led the study, told the Post.
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