Infectious disease expert Dr. Ian Lipkin, an epidemiologist from Columbia University who is currently advising authorities in China, told CBS News Wednesday that there is a singular problem at the root of this outbreak, and if it isn’t addressed, there will be similar viruses cropping up “every couple of years.”
The coronavirus sweeping through China is believed to have originated in wild animals, possibly bats, before jumping into the human population, and it may well have made that jump in the close quarters that wild animals share with humans, food and domestic animals at markets like the one in the city of Wuhan.
“I want the wild animal markets closed,” Lipkin said bluntly, noting that this new virus is not unique in coming from animals.
“You’re talking about HIV, Nipah [virus], Marburg virus, Ebola virus, influenzas, these are all what we call zoonosis; these are infectious agents that originated in wild animals and moved into people. If you take wild animals and you put them into a market with domestic animals or other animals, where there’s an opportunity for a virus to jump species, to adapt from a bat to a small mammal-like a rodent or a ferret, and then jump into humans, you are creating a highway — a superhighway for viruses to go from the wild into people. We can’t do this anymore. We can’t tolerate this anymore.”
Lipkin, who worked with the Chinese during the SARS epidemic in 2003, said he had personally asked “Chinese leaders to show leadership internationally” by cracking down on the markets, which he said exist in other countries, too, in Asia but also in West Africa and South and Central America.
“We have to shut these wild animal markets,” Lipkin stressed. “If we don’t do that, we will see one of these emerging infectious diseases every couple of years.”
