Bronterre News

SOME THINGS gnaw away at you. In my case, it’s the vital angle all but forgotten about in the saturation coverage of the coronavirus crisis.

  News outlets dispense practically everything you could ever want to know about Covid-19. Apart, staggeringly, from one thing – sustained delving into its origins and, even more importantly, on what must be done to prevent future, and similarly devastating, viral assaults. There, we meet an uncomfortable reticence.

  We know precisely what’s been threatening to bring Wales and places worldwide to their knees. Why our towns have been looking like soporific Sunday afternoons circa 1958; why the NHS is under terrible stress; why businesses are burning through cash reserves and could face ruin, and financial and job security sent reeling.

  The culprit’s familiar. Magnified, it’s the virus that looks like a mouldy orange pierced by bunches of tiny red flowers. So, assuming that familiarity will have bred contempt, why is there so little political and media interest in action to prevent future coronavirus variants we are warned are a distinct possibility? 

  The basics we know: severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) and now SARS-CoV-2, the new coronavirus disease 2019, or Covid-19, have all sprung from viruses that have infected wild animals and evolved into new human coronaviruses able to spread like wildfire.

  But do not blame wildlife. We’re talking here about wolf-puppies, civets, porcupines, snakes, pangolins (fascinating scaled mammals resembling miniaturised plateosaurus dinosaurs). They didn’t ask to be rounded up and crammed, alive, into small cages before being killed for human consumption, and for putting in Chinese medicine.

The solid evidence is that the source of Covid-19 was the Huanan meat market in the city of Wuhan in China, where wild animals have been banged up after being plucked from their natural environments. 

  If they had simply been left alone, any viruses they may have been carrying would have posed no danger to human beings. Instead, this ghastly trade has turned wild creatures into a commercial commodity, and enabled virulent viruses to leap from animals to people.

  In February, to curb the spread of Covid-19, China temporarily closed its so-called wet markets, which trade in an array of wildlife, and other live animals. But, from the middle of April, almost incredibly, it started reopening the markets. For the time being, the ban on selling wildlife apparently remains. But that’s hardly likely to calm fears the wildlife trade will creep back in, raising the terrifying prospect of a repeat of the Covid-19 disaster. 

  There’s no argument. Permanent closure of these markets would help to end the terrible trading of vulnerable and precious wild animals, and at the same time protect people, their social settings and their economies from another viral epidemic or pandemic.

  So where are the voices that back a permanent ban? Where the linked debate on people’s pitiless encroachment on wildlife territory? Except marginally, mainstream news media and politicians say next to nothing. Last month, the US government called on China to permanently close its wildlife markets, a demand now echoed by the Australian prime minister.  

  But there is no sustained howl of exasperation, no uncompromising demand for a decisive end to wet markets trade in wild animals to head off a potential Covid-20, 21 and 22. Why? Because China is the world’s biggest money-lender, and people hesitate to bite the hand that feeds them? Because of an overwhelming desire to ‘get back to normal’, a normality which may be short-lived unless people start looking beyond the immediate?  Whatever, the raging indignation which should be caused by the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, by the wrecking of economies and lives, is expressed by only a handful of niche and low-circulation publications. That’s surprising. After all, Grenfell Tower led to ultra-forensic investigations; sudden deaths are followed by inquests.

  Then there’s of course the bigger picture – the crying need for people to realise, once and for all, that the health of all life on the planet is linked. Deforestation and logging, for example, and agricultural expansion into undisturbed places, are not only unconscionable assaults on wildlife but endanger human health. Destroy forests and we chase wild animals from natural habitats and into contact with farmed livestock in unbalanced ecosystems, offering infectious agents the potential to run riot in human populations.

  The United Nations’ head of biodiversity, Elizabeth Maruma Mrema, puts it neatly: “The message we are getting is if we don’t take care of nature, it will take care of us.”