GAME FARM: Shangzheng Wei farms wild animals in Guangxi, China, where he houses nutria in outdoor enclosures.ALEKSEI CHMURA
Amid the bustle of a traditional produce market in southern China’s Guangxi province, a small menagerie surrounded New York-based disease ecologist Peter Daszak: sacks of toads, piles of salamanders, snakes, alligators, nocturnal mammals called civets, herons, and more. “There were hundreds of different species,” he recalls. “The diversity was incredible.”
Used in traditional cuisine and for medicine, the array of meats is in constant demand, and is frequently procured by trapping these animals in the wild. Earlier this year, Daszak and colleagues of his from EcoHealth Alliance were in the region hunting cryptic diversity: pathogens in these animals that are primed to enter human populations when the meat is handled or consumed.
In late 2002, a mysterious virus—the cause of an atypical pneumonia that would ...
