WHO Declares Global Health Emergency

The World Health Organization (WHO) on August 14, 2024, declared mpox as a “public health emergency of international concern” (PHEIC). And while agencies worldwide are tracking the spread of the pestilence, one facet of this PHEIC mirrors COVID-19, the one before it: bushmeat.

While the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market was identified as the epicentre site of the COVID-19 pandemic, bushmeat has been implicated since the 1970s in mpox. That is when the disease became first known to science.  

“Notable zoonotic diseases such as EVD (Ebola Virus Disease) and mpox have established origins from Central Africa in the 1970s and are believed to have been transmitted through bushmeat…,” a paper published last year and titled Mapping Global Bushmeat Activities to Improve Zoonotic Spillover Surveillance by Using Geospatial Modeling, had noted.

The WHO too recognises this. “MPXV (mpox virus) transmits between humans through close contact with lesions, body fluids, respiratory droplets or contaminated materials, or from animals to humans through contact with live animals or consumption of contaminated bushmeat,” it notes on its website.

But bushmeat in sub-Saharan Africa cannot be just wished away. For one, it provides food security to the region. It is also a cultural practice. How can zoonotic spillover be prevented then?

What is bushmeat?

The paper defines bushmeat as “the meat of terrestrial wild mammals hunted primarily for human consumption in tropical and subtropical regions”.

While terrestrial wild mammals make up just 1.8 per cent of the global biomass of mammals, over 70 per cent of zoonotic disease spillover events have been associated with wildlife and bushmeat, according to the paper.

“Hunting, preparing, and selling bushmeat (hereafter referred to as bushmeat activities) has been associated with high risk for zoonotic pathogen spillover due to contact with infectious materials from animals… For instance, Ebola virus spillover events and subsequent outbreaks in the Congo Basin have been traced back to hunters who were exposed to ape carcasses,” it noted.

Importance in Africa

The paper’s authors mapped bushmeat activities in tropical and subtropical rural areas. Their results were startling but not unexpected.

They found that the largest areas associated with bushmeat activities worldwide were in Central Africa, Southeast Asia, and West Africa.

The top 10 countries were Equatorial Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Malawi, Sierra Leone, Laos, Uganda, Vietnam, Côte d’Ivoire and Cameroon.

The country of Equatorial Guinea in Central Africa (which consists of Rio Muni on the African mainland and the island of Bioko) had the highest proportion of land area associated with bushmeat activities.

“Equatorial Guinea is also home to the largest bushmeat market in Africa, Malabo Market on Bioko Island, where recent efforts to limit bushmeat sales through bans have been largely ineffective,” the study noted.

According to the researchers, most countries of Central Africa have a negligible (like Gabon or the Democratic Republic of Congo or DRC) or limited (Cameroon and Central African Republic) domestic livestock sector. This is the reason why bushmeat is a crucial component of food security.

And the demand is increasing as Africa’s population rises. “Every year, five to six million tons of wild meat are harvested in Central Africa to respond to increasing demand,” noted the Wildlife Conservation Society last year.

The authors of a 2019 paper titled From the Forest to the Dish: A Comprehensive Study of the Wildmeat Value Chain in Yangambi, Democratic Republic of Congo, profiled the town of Yangambi near the key eastern city of Kisangani in terms of the bushmeat trade.

They found that the most traded species in Yangambi were small monkeys (38 per cent of the biomass) and red duikers (31 per cent), blue duikers, bush pigs, and bush tailed porcupines.

“Because zoonotic diseases known to be transmitted from wild mammals, such as mpox and Ebola, continue to emerge and expand geographically, an urgent need exists to integrate bushmeat activities into the epidemiology of emerging zoonoses,” the authors of the 2023 paper noted.

They used uncertainty levels on the map to identify 100 urban locations that could most benefit from future bushmeat surveillance efforts. The largest numbers were in Brazil, followed by DRC and Colombia.

Preventing spillover

The authors of both papers agreed that neither banning bushmeat nor behaviour change campaigns would make a difference.

The 2023 paper’s authors cited the importance of preventing deforestation.

“Deforestation associated with development of logging roads enables easier access to the deeper forest and provides faster transportation of hunted meat to villages and towns. Control of deforestation and logging is urgently needed and could have far-reaching benefits for preventing bushmeat-associated zoonoses, as already established with EVD,” the paper said.

Tackling climate change could also help as precipitation was a key factor that effected bushmeat activities.

“In most areas, hunting pressure increases during the dry season when the water sources dry up, but in other areas, bushmeat hunting is preferred in periods of increased rainfall because the hunting sites become inaccessible to conservation patrols,” according to the analysis.

The authors of the 2019 paper, on the other hand, advocated for creating alternative sources of food.

“While behavior change campaigns, as suggested by Chaves et al. (2018), might work in some contexts, we believe that patterns of bushmeat consumption in Yangambi will not change until alternative sources of food and income for a growing population can be established. Where the dependency on the resource is so intrinsically linked to people’s basic needs, there are little chances that behavioral change campaigns will have a significant impact,” they wrote.