R
ELEASED from quarantine in a
hotel in Wuhan, China, this January,
Peter Daszak made for the wildlife
market linked to the first cases of a
mystery pneumonia in the closing days of- Back then, the Huanan seafood market
was a jostling scrum of stalls selling not just
seafood, but all manner of domestic and exotic
wild animals, the living cheek by jowl with the
dead.
It is now an empty shell, closed since the
first cluster of cases of what morphed into the
covid-19 pandemic. Daszak, a zoologist, visited
earlier this year as a member of the World
Health Organization-backed team sent to
investigate the origins of the virus causing
that illness, SARS-CoV-2, and assess what role
the now-infamous market might have played.
No one yet knows, and hypotheses will take
years to test. But it is clear that the Huanan
outbreak was just a symptom of a sickness,
not a cause of it. For two decades, evidence
has been building of the link between how we
encroach on, degrade and exploit the natural
world and the risk of “zoonoses” – animal
diseases that spill over into humans.
Some of those links are still fuzzy, and there
are competing views on how important each
is. “It’s big and complex, and there are quite
a lot of unknowns,” says Christian Walzer at the
Wildlife Conservation Society in New York. But
we know enough to say one thing: if we don’t
act on what we have already learned, the costs
to human health and wealth of pandemics >
Features
Spillover
The covid-19 pandemic
was precipitated by
our disruption of
natural ecosystems.
But how exactly, asks
Adam Vaughan
SE
LMANHOŞGÖR