Via Time.com, a thoughtful report by Bryan Walsh: Saudi Coronavirus Underscores Need to Police Disease in Animals. Excerpt:
An emerging infectious disease like SARS pulls back the curtain on our world and demonstrates just how interconnected we all are, in more ways than just the global economy or international air travel.
SARS, like most new diseases, started in an animal before jumping across the species barrier to human beings. The original reservoir for SARS was actually a bat, and it’s still not clear how the virus managed to cross from them to us, though the anything-goes standards of the live markets of southern China, where wild animals of all sorts are available for consumption and where the SARS outbreak began, definitely played a role.
Researchers initially thought that civet cats transmitted the virus to human beings — Chinese officials even culled thousands of civet cats in the months after SARS to prevent a resurgence — though now it seems possible that the cats caught it from us.
No matter how the virus jumped, it made one thing clear: virologically speaking, we’re connected not just to humans, but to many other species. Their health is ours.
