Coronavirus Global Response: Banning Wildlife Markets May Prevent Future Pandemics, UN Biodiversity Chief Says

Elizabeth Maruma Mrema, the acting executive secretary of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, said Monday that banning “wet markets” where live and dead animals are kept could be a major step towards preventing future pandemics. The ongoing coronavirus outbreak has been tied to a live animal and seafood market in Wuhan, China.

“It would be good to ban the live animal markets as China has done and some countries,” Mrema told the Guardian. “But we should also remember you have communities, particularly from low-income rural areas, particularly in Africa, which are dependent on wild animals to sustain the livelihoods of millions of people.

“So unless we get alternatives for these communities, there might be a danger of opening up illegal trade in wild animals which currently is already leading us to the brink of extinction for some species,” she said. “We need to look at how we balance that and really close the hole of illegal trade in the future.”

Chinese authorities implemented a temporary ban on wildlife markets in late January, but conservation groups and health experts have called for the ban to be made permanent.

″(A permanent ban) is very, very important. Because any advocacy, code of conduct and supervision will lack the basis if there is no legal basis,” Dr. Zhou Jinfeng, the director-general of the Beijing-based China Biodiversity Conservation and Green Development Foundation, told CNBC in an email. At the same time, he warned it could be difficult to implement the laws, as some government officials themselves are involved in wildlife markets and illegal trading.

Pangolins and bats have been suspected as possible carriers of the coronavirus. Some disease experts claim that other species could carry the virus, and then reintroduce it to humans in the future.

“As the virus is spreading around the world, it might find entirely new reservoir hosts [outside of] China,” virologist Ralph Baric at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill told National Geographic. “We don’t know. It is something every country needs to be thinking about as the epidemics wind down.”

The coronavirus has been classified as a “pandemic” by the World Health Organization, as the disease forces countries around the globe to shut down non-essential businesses. As of Monday at 12:15 p.m. ET, there are 1,292,564 cases of the coronavirus around the world, with the global death toll at 70,590.