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University of Nebraska Medical Center

Stopping mpox: wild meat markets are a root cause and must be made safer

The Conversation In many countries around the world, wild animals are sometimes killed for food, including monkeys, rats and squirrels.

Wild meat makes significant contributions to nutrition in Africa and to satisfying food preferences in Asia.

In Africa, the annual harvest of wild meat, estimated at between 1 million and 5 million metric tonnes, is substantial compared to the continent’s livestock production of about 14 million metric tonnes per year.

Public health researchers have long highlighted unhygienic wild meat practices as potentially harmful due to the risk of pathogens jumping from animals to humans, especially through close contact during hunting, processing or consuming undercooked meat. This concern was particularly pronounced during the 2014 Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Ebola is known to jump from animals to humans, who are likely infected either by touching or consuming sick or dead infected forest animals, such as fruit bats.

Mpox is another zoonotic disease that is known to jump from animals to humans. More than 1,100 people have died of mpox in Africa, where some 48,000 cases have been recorded since January 2024 in 19 countries.

Strategies to beat the 2024 mpox outbreak have so far largely focused on preventing human-to-human transmission.

But we also need to go back to the root causes of disease, particularly where mpox is transmitted from animals to humans.

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