NYT The nation uses an enormous number of animals for commercial purposes, and regulations do not adequately protect against outbreaks, experts concluded.
The United States is home to an enormous array of animal industries — including industrial agriculture, fur farming and the exotic pet trade — that pose a significant risk of creating infectious disease outbreaks in humans, according to a new report by experts at Harvard Law School and New York University. Moreover, the nation “has no comprehensive strategy” to mitigate the dangers posed by these practices, many of which operate with little regulation and out of public view, the authors concluded.
“The risk is staggering, because our use of animals is staggering,” said Ann Linder, the report’s lead author and an associate director at Harvard’s animal law and policy program. “And we don’t even really understand where that risk is.”
Zoonotic diseases, or those that spread from animals to humans, account for roughly 60 percent of all known infectious diseases and 75 percent of new and emerging ones, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Although the exact origins of the Covid-19 pandemic remain murky, the possibility that the coronavirus might have first jumped into humans at a live animal market in Wuhan, China, prompted calls to shut down these so-called wet markets, especially in Asia.
“It was very unclear what people even meant by wet markets, except that they were something that exists only in other countries,” said Dale Jamieson, an author of the report and the director of the Center for Environmental and Animal Protection at N.Y.U.
But the new report highlights the extent to which Americans engage in many of these same high-risk practices. There are at least 130 live bird markets in the northeastern United States alone, the report notes; roughly 25 million birds pass through them every year.
There have already been multiple outbreaks of highly pathogenic bird flu at live bird markets in the United States this year, the report says, and evidence suggests that swine flu has previously spilled over into humans at live animal markets in Minneapolis.