Peter J. Li

Opinion | First Sars, now the Wuhan coronavirus. Here’s why China should ban its wildlife trade forever

Both coronaviruses are linked to live animal markets, where sick, injured and dying animals are sold as exotic foods but end up transmitting disease

For too long, wildlife traders have been allowed to hide behind empty claims of medicine or conservation. It’s time to ban the unsavoury trade permanently

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The Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, closed on January 1, is thought to be ground zero in the spread of the deadly coronavirus named 2019-nCoV. Photo: AFP

Peter J. Li

Published: 9:00am, 29 Jan 2020Updated: 9:11am, 29 Jan 2020

The deadly coronavirus, 2019-nCoV, has paralysed Wuhan and plunged China into a state of emergency. Sweeping across Chinese provinces, municipalities and special administrative regions, the epidemic has killed at least 106 people in the country.

With the death toll and number of infections climbing, this is turning into a major global public health crisis, similar to that caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) in 2003. People infected with the 2019-nCoV have been found in countries across North America, Europe, Southeast and South Asia.

The Wuhan coronavirus has confirmed the worst fears of many who have long called for an end to China’s wildlife wet markets. While two groups of scientists were debating whether the hosts of the 2019-nCoV were snakes, birds or mammals, the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention has confirmed, after successfully isolating the novel coronavirus in environmental samples collected from the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, that it came from wildlife animals sold in the market in downtown Hankou of Wuhan.

The first group of Wuhan’s 2019-nCoV patients were mostly traders at the market; one early patient had never visited it. The wet market had a section selling some 120 wildlife animals across 75 species. The first group of Wuhan patients is similar to the first group of Sars patients, who were also traders of wildlife in Guangdong.

All wildlife trade activities have now been banned after a notice by the agriculture and rural affairs ministry, the state administration for market regulation, and the state forestry. While the ban, which took effect on January 26, is temporary, aiming to suspend trade only until the epidemic is over, this joint action suggests the national government has finally accepted the findings of Chinese scientists.

China’s top Sars authority Professor Zhong Nanshan had proposed a lasting ban back in 2010, when he warned of a similar pandemic if wildlife markets remained open. Professor Guan Yi, a Hong Kong University virologist who studied the Sars pathogen in 2003, had also made the same proposal. The 2019-nCoV is the huge price we are paying for snubbing the country’s top scientists.