In a wild animal market in Indonesia’s North Sulawesi province, bats are still on the menu.
Many of them are caught by hunters in forests using nets and hooks. Once at the market, their wings are removed, their fur scorched off using a blow torch, and they’re then skewered ready for cooking.In many places where bats are a delicacy, they’ve been off the menu in recent months
The link between bushmeat and the potential for the transfer of viruses has turned up the heat on this rogue trade.
An animal market in Wuhan is where it’s believed COVID-19 first made the leap from animal to human.Indonesia’s Langowan market is well known for its exotic meats like snake, lizard, rats, and wild boar.
“Buyers were afraid to eat bat meat. But gradually, because they think that we have a different way of cooking, they are not afraid of it anymore,” manager Yani Tulangow told Business Insider Today. “Recently trade is back to normal.”Tulangow told us that there are no controls over the bat meat sold at the market. And he has no plans to shut down any of the wild animal trade. But according to experts, a market where different species are brought together and butchered in unhygienic surroundings is the ideal environment for a spillover event to occur.
“It is likely what is going on in Wuhan will be occurring in Indonesia,” Raden Wasito, professor of veterinary medicine at Gadjah Mada University said from his laboratory in Jakarta.
“The Wuhan situation where the coronavirus became pandemic, it’s almost similar to what is going on in Indonesia where there are so many wild animal markets. All of those things can create a reservoir for many kinds of diseases.”
“Spillovers are common, they are happening all the time,” Dave Redding, a senior researcher at the the Centre for Biodiversity and Environment Research at University College London, told Business Insider Today.
“People get illnesses from livestock all over the world. That’s happening every single day, tens, if not hundreds of times.””And I don’t think these wet markets are going to have the same impact as all of the other contacts that are going on. And so it may be a really nice thing to say, we can just get rid of wet markets and it will solve the problem. It won’t solve the problem.”
Investigators from the World Health Organization are still working to determine the exact origins of COVID-19.
Bats are a prime suspect, perhaps transferring the virus to people by way of another animal host.”There are multiple coronaviruses known, some of which are closely related to SARS, some of which are closely related to COVID,” Kris Murray, senior lecturer in Infectious Disease Epidemiology at Imperial College London, said. “And it does look like this particular particular group of bats is a sort of reservoir, the animal reservoir, for these groups of coronaviruses.”
There are over 1,000 species of bat. Living in tight colonies but able to travel large distances, they are effective at not only hosting, but transfering pathogens.But even if bats are to blame this time, Murray is keen to point out the chances of a new infectious disease passing from a bat, or any animal, to a human – and then going on to become a lethal pandemic – is still tiny. “We have had a very long history of exposure to wildlife and we’ve had every opportunity in the last 100 years of massive environmental destruction for so many of these things to have spilled out from wildlife into people,” he said.
Source: Business Insider
