Wildlife trafficking is a clear and present danger and not only to endangered species. It is also posing a grave risk to people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
By trafficking protected species far and wide, often continents away from their original habitats, criminal syndicates with a global reach are helping spread new diseases around the planet. At the same time, they are undermining disease-monitoring strategies by smuggling exotic animals through national boundaries with wanton impunity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Poaching and other forms of biodiversity destruction, such as deforestation, are also removing natural \u201cbuffer zones between humans and wild fauna, making it more likely that animal pathogens come into contact with people,\u201d in the words of the United Nations\u2019 Environment Programme.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWhen criminal actors trade in endangered species, they weaken entire ecosystems and they threaten essential links of the world\u2019s biological diversity,\u201d UN Environment says<\/a>. \u201cSpecimens that are traded illegally are also much less likely to be sold or bought where sanitary standards are being properly enforced, making the spread of diseases more likely.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Numerous disease-carrying pathogens that have caused grave health concerns in recent years and decades have been traced back to wild animals. The Ebola virus, which causes frequently fatal hemorrhagic fever, likely orignated from a wild animal, possibly a fruit bat, in Africa in the mid-1970s. Meanwhile, the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19 probably originated in a horseshoe bat in China late last year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe know that many emerging infectious diseases in recent times have originated in wild animals,\u201d UN Environment says. \u201cMany of them were not considered illegally-traded CITES-listed species,\u201d it adds. \u201cHowever, illegal wildlife trade flows will only make these episodes worse, by degrading or bringing people too close to animal habitats, and therefore contributing to the spread of diseases.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Complicating matters is that animals infected with viruses and other pathogens may not show any signs of being sick, which may give people who handle them a false sense of security. Research has\u00a0shown that<\/a>\u00a0wild bats, which are\u00a0major reservoirs of various coronaviruses<\/a>, are often largely immune to those viruses. Yet once those viruses manage to jump the species barrier to people they can easily become lethal to us. Read more…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Wildlife trafficking is a clear and present danger and not only to endangered species. It is also posing a grave risk to people. By trafficking protected species far and wide,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":9578,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":"","pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":"","_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[101],"tags":[455,801,1542],"class_list":["post-9577","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-international-news","tag-covid-19","tag-human-health","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9577","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9577"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9577\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9578"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9577"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9577"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9577"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}