Christian Walzer, executive director of global health at the Wildlife Conservation Society, talks about how the wildlife trade, especially for human consumption, can lead to disease outbreaks.
This is another in our series of coronavirus episodes of Scientific American’s Science Talk, posted on March 19, 2020. I’m Steve Mirsky.
In early March, the prime minister of Vietnam directed the government to draft a directive to prohibit wildlife trade and consumption, to be submitted to him by April 1, 2020. In February China took similar actions.
To find out more about the wildlife trade and its relationship to the current coronavirus outbreak, I called Christian Walzer. He’s the executive director of global health at the Wildlife Conservation Society. We both live in the Bronx, but due to the current situation, we spoke by phone.
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