Wildlife Trade and Global Disease Emergence

Abstract

The global trade in wildlife provides disease transmission mechanisms that not only cause human disease outbreaks but also threaten livestock, international trade, rural livelihoods, native wildlife populations, and the health of ecosystems. Outbreaks resulting from wildlife trade have caused hundreds of billions of dollars of economic damage globally. Rather than attempting to eradicate pathogens or the wild species that may harbor them, a practical approach would include decreasing the contact rate among species, including humans, at the interface created by the wildlife trade. Since wildlife marketing functions as a system of scale-free networks with major hubs, these points provide control opportunities to maximize the effects of regulatory efforts.

Avian Influenza H5N1 and the Wild Bird Trade in Hanoi, Vietnam

“…Obtaining precise estimates of the scale of wildlife trade is problematic because much of it is conducted illegally through underground national and international networks (Broad et al 2003, Karesh et al 2005, Févre et al 2006. Available evidence suggests that illegal wildlife trade for food, traditional medicine, pets, and decoration ranks second to the illegal narcotic trade in terms of the financial value of illegal activities (Roth and Mertz 1997).…”

Scale-Free Distribution of Avian Influenza Outbreaks

“…In this Letter, we focus on transmission of the avian influenza virus in wild and domestic bird populations. There is good reason to suppose that transmission of this virus between bird flocks may follow a scale-free distribution [10]. Nonetheless, it is currently not obvious that the traditional, and alternative, uniform mixing models are inadequate.…”

The Animal-Human Interface and Infectious Disease in Industrial Food Animal Production: Rethinking Biosecurity and Biocontainment

“…This has been well documented in terms of zoonoses arising from wild animal species 77 and in regard to food safety, 78 but it remains underrecognized in terms of workers involved in the production of domesticated animals.…”