Why rising interactions between bats and humans pose major global health risks | CPT PPP Coverage

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Dr. Neil Vora:

Well, there might have been an intermediary animal in between. So the virus might have originated from bats, jumped over into an intermediate animal and then jumped on into people. And every time a virus passes from one species to the next, it actually can accumulate mutations that increase its pathogenicity, its virulence, meaning that the virus can become more infectious to people and more dangerous as well.

And so there’s a lot of different possible pathways here. But the bottom line is, again, that we know that there are certain high risk animals that pose public health threats. So when they’re sold in these markets, in urban settings, we have to be taking actions to improve the public health around that.

But I also want to be clear that we don’t want to take away the rights of indigenous peoples and local communities from being able to access those wildlife species. People certainly have a right to access them, but there’s very little reason why wildlife needs to be sold in an urban market, because there’s many other sources of protein that people in urban areas can be accessing.