The Washington Post - 06.04.2020

a2 eZ re the washington post.monday, april 6 , 2020

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Wisconsin

Two men arrested in fatal shooting of couple

A University of Wisconsin physician and her husband, whose bodies were found at the school’s arboretum near the Madison campus, were shot to death, and a second suspect in the killings has been arrested, police said. Police said Saturday that they arrested Ali’jah Larrue, 18, on Friday night. Larrue was booked into jail on two counts of party to the crime of first-degree intentional homicide. UW police spokesman Marc Lovicott said Sunday that Larrue is an acquaintance of the other suspect, Khari Sanford, 18, who was arrested earlier Friday and booked on the same charges. “We are confident these are the two guys,” Lovicott told the Associated Press, although the investigation remains active. A jogger found the bodies of Beth Potter, 52, and her husband, Robin Carre, 57, on Tuesday in a ditch at the university’s arboretum, a

popular research and recreational area. Lovicott said that the couple had been shot at the arboretum sometime overnight before their bodies were found, but that

police were not ready to discuss a motive. Police have said the couple was targeted and that Sanford was known to the victims’ family. The men have not been formally charged but are expected to make their initial court appearances early this week, Lovicott said. — Associated Press

georgia

Outreach group to be led by MLK’s daughter

One of the daughters of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. will help lead a new outreach committee in Georgia as the state copes with the novel coronavirus, Gov. Brian Kemp (R) said Sunday. M ore than a dozen other members, including business and nonprofit leaders, make up the committee. “Comprised of talented

individuals from the public and private sectors, I am confident this committee will ensure that our state remains prepared in the fight against COVID-19,” t he Republican governor said in a statement on Sunday. — Associated Press

West Virginia

Mine blast observance canceled due to virus

A planned public gathering was shelved on the 10th anniversary of the worst U.S. mining disaster in decades. Heartfelt speeches gave way Sunday to silent remembrances and individual prayers for the 29 men who died at the Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia. The coronavirus pandemic prompted the decision weeks ago to cancel the event. Instead, mourners were allowed to lay wreaths from dusk to dawn at a memorial site in Whitesville, not far from the mine. To mmy Davis, who was working at the mine on April 5, 2010, said he was going regardless. He lost a son, brother and a nephew. “I’ll be there to pay my respects and do my remembering and set out my flowers as I usually do,” s aid Davis, now retired. “ I’m doing my normal thing. I don’t change nothing up regardless of what’s going on in the world around us.” Another Upper Big Branch retiree, Stanley Stewart, said he agreed with the decision to cancel the event. He has skipped visiting the memorial every year in favor of personal reflections at home. He and his wife planned to observe a moment of silence at 3:02 p.m., the time of the explosion, Stewart said. — Associated Press

digest

John hart/Wisconsin state Journal/associated Press Vehicles from the Madison Police Department, the Dane County Sheriff's Office and the University of Wisconsin Police Department are stationed outside the arboretum in Madison, Wis., as law enforcement personnel investigate a double homicide on March 31.

the Week ahead

tuesday

the Wisconsin legislature
considers all-mail primary voting.

Wednesday

the Federal reserve’s Federal
open Market committee releases
minutes of its March 15 meeting.

thursday

Jobless claims for the week
ended april 4 may total 5 million.

producer prices for March are
expected to fall by 0.3 percent.

Friday

consumer prices for March are
expected to rise 0.3 percent.

BY KARIN BRULLIARD

The new coronavirus, which
has traversed the globe to infect
more than 1 million people, began
like so many pandemics and out-
breaks before: i nside an animal.
The virus’s original host was
almost certainly a bat, as was the
case with Ebola, SARS, MERS and
lesser-known viruses such as
Nipah and Marburg. HIV migrat-
ed to humans m ore than a century
ago from a chimpanzee. Influenza
A has jumped from wild birds to
pigs to people. Rodents spread
Lassa fever in West A frica.
But the problem is not the ani-
mals, according to scientists who
study the zoonotic diseases that
pass between animals and hu-
mans. I t’s us.
Wild animals have always had
viruses coursing through their
bodies. But a global wildlife trade
worth billions of dollars, agricul-
tural intensification, deforesta-
tion and urbanization are bring-
ing people closer to animals, giv-
ing their viruses more of what they
need to infect us: opportunity.
Most fail. Some succeed on small
scales. Very few — like SARS-
CoV-2 — triumph, aided by a su-
premely interconnected human
population that can transport a
pathogen around the world on a
jet in mere hours.
As the world scrambles to cope

with an unprecedented public health and economic crisis, many disease researchers say the coronavirus pandemic must be taken as a deadly warning. That means thinking of animals as partners whose health and habitats should be protected to stave off the next global outbreak. “Pandemics as a whole are in- creasing in frequency,” said Peter Daszak, a disease ecologist who is president of EcoHealth Alliance, a public health organization that studies emerging diseases. “It’s not a random act of God. It’s c aused b y what we do to the environment. We need to start connecting that chain and say we need to do these things in a less r isky way.” Some 70 percent of emerging infectious diseases in humans are of zoonotic origin, scientists say, and nearly 1 .7 m illion u ndiscovered viruses may exist in wildlife. Many researchers are searching for the ones that could cause the next animal-to-human spillover. The likeliest hot spots have three things in common, Daszak said: lots of people, diverse plants and animals, and rapid environmental changes. They also are home to many of the likeliest zoonotic disease hosts: rodents and bats. About half of mammal species are rodents, and about a quarter are bats. But bats make up about 50 percent of mammals in the most

biodiverse tropical regions, and while t hey are valuable pollinators and pest eaters, they are also as- tounding virus vessels. Bats have a superhero-like immune system th at a llows them t o become “reser- voirs to many pathogens that do not impact them but can have a tremendous impact on us if they’re able to make the jump,” said Thomas Gillespie, a disease ecologist at E mory University. Increasingly, w e make the j ump easier. Late last year, a horseshoe bat coronavirus is thought to have leaped in China, where commerce in exotic animals is d riven by luxu- ry tastes in game and demand for parts u sed f or medicinal purposes. At a “wet market” in Wuhan linked to an early cluster of coronavirus cases, at least one store sold creatures including wolf c ubs and masked palm civets for con- sumption. Such markets, experts say, feature stressed and ill animals stacked in cages, bodily flu- ids sprinkling down, as well as butchering — prime conditions for v iral spillover. Although horseshoe bats are hunted and eaten in China, how the s uspected bat virus first infected people will not be easily de- duced. An early cluster of cases was traced to the sprawling animal market, but it was closed and sanitized b efore researchers could track down what animal might have been implicated. And it was probably not the location of the spillover itself, which could have happened weeks earlier, possibly in November. Some of the first cases had no connection to the animal market. Because the new virus isn’t identical to any known bat virus, somewhere between the bat and human beings, the virus mutated in at least one intermediary, per- haps the endangered pangolin, a mammal heavily trafficked for its scales. The 2003 SARS outbreak, which eventually was linked to horseshoe bats by scientists who spelunked through slippery caves lined with bat guano, was also traced to wild animal markets. Scientists think that coronavirus jumped from b ats to masked palm civets — catlike mammals sold for meat — to humans. “One of the key interfaces for these spillover events to occur are markets and the international trade of wildlife,” Chris Walzer, executive director for the Wildlife Conservation Society’s global health program, told reporters on Thursday. In Africa, dwindling popula- tions of large mammals means game is increasingly from smaller species, including rodents and bats, said Fabian Leendertz, a vet- erinarian who studies zoonotic diseases at the Robert Koch Insti- tute in Berlin. While some is con-

sumed for subsistence or tradi- tional purposes, exotic meat sales are also a “huge economy” in the fast-growing megacities, Leen- dertz said. “That’s something I would stop first,” he said. “The risk is not because the meat travels... but it results i n higher hunting pressure and higher contact rate for those who go hunting and those who take i t apart.” The international trade in exotic pets such as reptiles and fish is also a concern, because the animals are rarely tested for pathogens that could sicken humans, Daszak said. So are large “factory” farms packed with animals, Gillespie said. “When I think about what’s the primary risk f actor, it’s i nfluenza A that’s linked to pig and chicken production,” he said. But harvesting and raising animals are not the only venues for spillover. Humans increasingly share space with wildlife and alter it in perilous ways, researchers say. Lyme disease, caused by a bac- teria, spreads more easily in the eastern United States because fragmented forests have fewer predators, such as foxes and opos- sums, that eat mice that host Lyme-spreading ticks, studies have found. Building leads to a closer coexistence with some wild animals, including bats, Leen- dertz said. Scientists point to the 1998 emergence in Malaysia of Nipah virus, which has killed hundreds of people in several outbreaks in Asia, as a vivid example of spillover fueled by environmental

change and agricultural intensification. The clearing of rainforests for palm oil and lumber and live- stock displaced fruit bats, some of which ended up on new pig farms where m ango and o ther f ruit trees also grew, they say. Bats “drop more than they eat,” Gillespie said, and their saliva and feces infected the pigs. Pigs sickened farmwork- ers a nd others in t he industry. “Wherever we’re creating novel interfaces, this is likely a risk that we need to be seriously consider- ing,” he said. “It’s forcing wildlife to look for new food sources. It’s forcing them to change their be- havior in ways that puts them in a better position to transfer the pathogen to u s.” As Earth’s human population hurtles toward 8 billion, no one thinks human-animal interaction is going to decrease. The key is reducing the risk of a devastating spillover, scientists say — and not by killing bats. But they acknowl- edge that cultural and economic pressures make change d ifficult. The Wildlife Conservation Soci- ety and other groups have called on countries to prohibit the trade in wild animals for food and close wet markets. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious-diseases expert and the face of the U.S. response to the pandemic, said Friday that the world community should pressure China and other nations that host such markets to shut them down “It just boggles my mind how, when we have so many diseases that emanate out of that unusual human-animal interface, that we don’t j ust shut it down,” Fauci told Fox News’s “Fox & Friends.”

China, which briefly stopped the trade in civets after the SARS outbreak, announced in January a ban on the transport and sale of wild animals, but only until the coronavirus epidemic is eliminat- ed. Permanent legislation is needed, s aid Aili Kang, executive director o f WCS’s Asia p rogram. Not everyone agrees. Bans could cause markets to move un- derground, some say. Daszak not- ed that Westerners also eat wild animals — seafood and deer, for example. Instead, he said, trade should be regulated and the animals rigorously tested for pathogens. Stronger surveillance f or illness in wild a nimals — regarding them as “sentinels” — is needed, Leen- dertz said. So i s a widespread real- ization that building in wild habitats can fuel public health crises, Gillespie said. Many researchers say the coronavirus pandemic underscores the need for a more holistic “one health” a pproach, which v iews human, animal and environmental health as interconnected. “There needs to be a cultural shift from a community level up about how we treat animals, our understanding o f the dangers and biosecurity risks that we’re expos- ing ourselves to,” s aid Kate Jones, chair of ecology and biodiversity at University College London. “That means leaving ecosystems intact, not destroying them. It means thinking in a more long- term way.” [email protected]

Joel achenbach, Paulina Firozi and William Wan contributed to this report.

Animals have always carried dangerous pathogens. Society has sped their spread.

Bonnie Jo Mount/the Washington Post Bats gather in the Bat Cave in Queen Elizabeth National Park in Uganda in 2 018. Bats carry pathogens that can be dangerous to humans and were probably the original host of the novel coronavirus.

9:30 a.m. | the supreme court issues orders. For developments, visit
washingtonpost.com/national.

11 a.m. | Washington capitals coach todd reirden holds a conference
call with reporters to discuss the state of the hockey team. Visit
postsports.com for details.

2 p.m. | Virginia gov. ralph northam (d) holds a briefing on his state’s
response to the novel coronavirus. For developments, visit
washingtonpost.com/local.

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