The World Health Organization said that markets selling live animals shouldn’t be closed, though it acknowledged a wet market in China likely played a role in the coronavirus pandemic.
Peter Ben Embarek, a food safety and animal diseases expert with the WHO, said Friday that the markets shouldn’t be shuttered across the board as they provide food and jobs to people in not just China but countries across the world. He said that instead of closing them, they should be improved to provide better epidemic safeguards, according to the Associated Press.
“Food safety in these environments is rather difficult, and, therefore, it’s not surprising that sometimes we also have these events happening within markets,” Ben Embarek said.
Some of those safeguards would include separating the live animals being sold from the humans that purchase them. Ben Embarek said it is still not clear if the virus began at the wet market in Wuhan, China, or if that environment just helped the coronavirus spread among residents in the city of 11 million. He explained that the WHO was still investigating the origins of the outbreak and its subsequent evolution into a global pandemic.
He pointed out that certain animal species have been shown to contract the virus, including dogs, cats, and tigers. He said knowing which species are susceptible is important in stopping potential outbreaks in the future.
“We don’t want to create a new reservoir in animals that could continue to create infections in humans,” the scientist said.
Almost 4 million people have been infected with COVID-19 worldwide, resulting in at least 273,000 deaths, according to a tally by Johns Hopkins University.
