Jane Qiu in Nature:
The world is still recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic, which many researchers say probably started, or was at least amplified, at a market selling live animals in Wuhan, China1,2. Yet the wildlife trade still thrives in many parts of the globe. China banned the farming and trading of most wildlife species for food in 2020, but these practices have simply gone underground. “We are back to business as usual,” says Vincent Nijman, a conservation biologist at Oxford Brookes University, UK, with “millions and millions of animals being traded on a daily basis”.
The wildlife trade acts as a vast global network of unregulated natural laboratories, through which potential pathogens freely circulate, evolve and ultimately congregate in urban centres, says Andrew Cunningham, a wildlife epidemiologist at the Institute of Zoology in London. “It’s the scariest thing we are doing,” he says.
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