By Liam Mannix June 14, 2020 — 4.27pm
Examples of trafficked wildlife in Vietnam are detailed in the paper
Photo: medRxiv
“These results are pretty much what all of us in this business expect,” said Professor Hamish McCallum, a wildlife disease ecologist at Griffith University's Environmental Futures Research Institute.
“If you wanted a way to transfer viruses between species and amplify them, you couldn’t find a better way to do it than wildlife trading.”
Humans are affected by a few hundred viruses; scientists think there may be about 1.67 million viruses circulating in mammals and waterfowl.
The researchers tracked the Vietnamese rat trade – about 3400 tonnes of live rat were processed annually for consumption at the time – at 70 sites, including farms, markets and restaurants.
Vietnam has a significant wildlife farming industry, which rears rodents, boar, snakes, deer and crocodiles for sale to restaurants, much of it destined for China.
They also looked at bats living in "guano farms", structures often set up near towns so people can harvest the bats' manure as fertiliser.
Among 1506 bats and rats tested, a third of the animals tested positive for bird and bat coronaviruses. Every single rodent market and nearly all bat farms had animals with the viruses.
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