Ebola

I see you've added to your two-word reply by edit, I'll just reply with another post rather than add to my other one. How much of a problem is it? And how many people has it kept from starving to death? What, in Africa?I don't oppose or support anything at all. I have exactly zero impact on African countries' legislation.And as it pertains to Ebola?I don't think bushmeat should even be on the radar. It certainly shouldn't be the focus of any legislation.What would the legislation actually do? And how could the legislation be enforced?If there's some starving guy in Africa that is about to die and he finds a dead animal, are you really going to be the one to tell him that he has to starve to death instead of eating that meat because that's what the law says?Do you think he's going to give even the slightest fuck what the law says?Or do you think a starving person would opt for the immediate saving of his own life at the expense of some rich american on the other side of the globe who has concerns about a virus?

That was the original claim, Jon.How is the rate of disease transmission different?

You can still have an opinion. Well; it is the source of the Ebola virus and other similarly epidemic diseases. When monkeypox jumped from prairie dogs and imported animals to humans, the FDA and CDC put together a ban on trafficking these animals:

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"Animal Commerce Rules Tightened to Prevent Monkeypox" from CIDRAP (Unniversity of Minnesota):

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An outbreak of human monkeypox in the United States last May and June was traced to a shipment of imported African rodents. The disease apparently spread from the rodents to pet prairie dogs and on to people, leading to 37 confirmed, 12 probable, and 22 suspected human cases.
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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) banned the importation of all African rodents in June. At the same time, the CDC and FDA banned interstate commerce in prairie dogs and six kinds of African rodents: tree squirrels, rope squirrels, dormice, Gambian giant pouched rats, brush-tailed porcupines, and striped mice.

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The FDA declared the ban successful and later lifted its portion claiming the adequacy of the CDC ban to contain the problem.

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Control of Communicable Diseases; Restrictions on African Rodents, Prairie Dogs, and Certain Other Animals (PDF) from Federal Register 73.174 (2008):

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The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is removing its regulation that established restrictions on the capture, transport, sale, barter, exchange, distribution, and release of African rodents, prairie dogs, and certain other animals. We are removing the restrictions because we believe they are no longer needed to prevent the further introduction, transmission, or spread of monkeypox, a communicable and potentially fatal disease, in the United States. (p. 51912 [1])
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They concluded that the risk for further domestically acquired human infections is low with the restrictions that FDA and CDC had established. (p. 51915 [4])
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The risk assessment published in 2006, however, suggests that the risk of further monkeypox transmission from the original events of 2003, particularly to humans, in the United States is low. Consequently, based on that low risk, we believe that the import controls of CDC's interim final rule 42 CFR 71.56 and routine State surveillance and disease prevention measures should be sufficient to prevent further human and animal monkeypox cases. Therefore, we have concluded that the domestic controls in 21 CF 1240.63 are no longer necessary, and we are removing our regulation.  (p. 51916 [5])

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Properly implemented and enforced bans can contain zoonotic diseases. It seems a little overly dismissive to think legislation regarding the bushmeat trade and consumption of bushmeat has no place in a discussion on Ebola. Both good questions probably worth investigating in this thread, since the bushmeat trade seems to be implicated in the transmission of Ebola to humans. That's certainly a problem and will complicate enforcement. But regulating bushmeat is still possible. For example, in some cases hunger is not even a concern:

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"Ebola and Bushmeat in Africa: Q&A with Leading Researcher" from Forest News:

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Ebola kills more gorillas and chimpanzees than it probably kills people every year. And what is happening is that people find dead animals in the forest, and they take this animal and they use them for bushmeat or, in the case of a gorilla sometimes, for cultural or magical practices.

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So right there is an immediate opportunity to decrease contact with infected bushmeat without increasing hunger.Where bushmeat is consumed for sustenance, it might help to know that a lot of it is harvested and prepared by third parties:

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"Why West Africans Keep Hunting and Eating Bushmeat Despite Ebola Concerns" from The Washington Post:

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Cameroon Tribune reporters visited a market recently and found that:

In spite of the current ban in the hunting of all species of animals due to their reproduction period, traders in bush meat do not seem bothered by the fact that they are into a forbidden trade. Yesterday July 29, 2014 Cameroon Tribune (CT) visited the bush meat market at the Nkolndongo neighbourhood in Yaounde. Besides the enormous display of smoked bush meat of all sorts, the number of fresh meat available outweighs that which has been smoked.

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While CT reporters went round the market showing interest in buying fresh pangolin, over 10 traders in pangolin, mostly women rushed forward with newly killed or life (sic) pangolin at different cost.

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Simple standards and sanitation practices could almost completely prevent zoonotic diseases from these sources (once fully cooked, there is no risk of Ebola).Finally, some people eat risky bushmeat even when other protein sources are available. We should not neglect instances of people eating bushmeat out of want rather than need, as these would also be good opportunities to decrease bushmeat consumption without increasing hunger.

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Ebola Outbreak: Why do People Eat Bat Meat? from International Business Times:

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While more education and urban living decreased interest in bat meat, researchers said this is not necessarily key to limiting the practice.

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"It is possible that increased household income could lead to increased bushmeat consumption, particularly as the meat appears to be seen as a luxury item," the researchers said.

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There are pretty simple things that can be done regarding bushmeat to almost eliminate the spread of diseases from animals. First, the practice of using animals (or their body parts) in rituals and cultural practices can be done away with. Second, better sanitation and preparation standards can minimize spreading diseases from infected animals (this includes regulations against selling animals found dead!). Third, a straight-up ban on bushmeat in general might have little impact on people who eat the meat for survival, but (if enforced) would likely stop people eating bushmeat as a delicacy in its tracks.The problem of disease transmission from bushmeat is a solvable problem. Bushmeat consumption is a bigger problem than you think. Not only does it transmit diseases to humans, but mass harvest of wild animals is unsustainable:

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"Ebola and Bushmeat in Africa: Q&A with Leading Researcher" from Forest News:

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From all the data we have, even for the most resilient species, the ones that reproduce very fast rodents, rats, mice it seems that in many places the populations are decreasing. So there is an overall population decrease because of over-harvesting in many places.

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Bushmeat consumption and the bushmeat trade are topics in their own right; but they are also intimately linked to outbreaks of certain diseases like Ebola. And so in a thread about Ebola, I think it is worth discussing these things: what effect they have on spreading the disease to humans; what measures can be taken to limit this spread; and how cultural practices might affect efforts to curb consumption of bushmeat or its unsafe handling.It really is a big question: What will we do to stop future transmissions of Ebola (and similar diseases) to humans?JonEdited by Jon, : missing words...

I don't engage in discussions with liars.Consider yourself on my 'ignore' list.

Just to add a little wider perspective to the discussion ... the ecology of disease

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Diseases have always come out of the woods and wildlife and found their way into human populations the plague and malaria are two examples. But emerging diseases have quadrupled in the last half-century, experts say, largely because of increasing human encroachment into habitat, especially in disease hot spots around the globe, mostly in tropical regions. And with modern air travel and a robust market in wildlife trafficking, the potential for a serious outbreak in large population centers is enormous.

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IT’S not just the invasion of intact tropical landscapes that can cause disease. The West Nile virus came to the United States from Africa but spread here because one of its favored hosts is the American robin, which thrives in a world of lawns and agricultural fields. And mosquitoes, which spread the disease, find robins especially appealing. The virus has had an important impact on human health in the United States because it took advantage of species that do well around people, says Marm Kilpatrick, a biologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The pivotal role of the robin in West Nile has earned it the title super spreader.

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And Lyme disease, the East Coast scourge, is very much a product of human changes to the environment: the reduction and fragmentation of large contiguous forests. Development chased off predators wolves, foxes, owls and hawks. That has resulted in a fivefold increase in white-footed mice, which are great reservoirs for the Lyme bacteria, probably because they have poor immune systems. And they are terrible groomers. When possums or gray squirrels groom, they remove 90 percent of the larval ticks that spread the disease, while mice kill just half. So mice are producing huge numbers of infected nymphs, says the Lyme disease researcher Richard Ostfeld.

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Dr. Ostfeld has seen two emerging diseases babesiosis and anaplasmosis that affect humans in the ticks he studies, and he has raised the alarm about the possibility of their spread.

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The best way to prevent the next outbreak in humans, specialists say, is with what they call the One Health Initiative a worldwide program, involving more than 600 scientists and other professionals, that advances the idea that human, animal and ecological health are inextricably linked and need to be studied and managed holistically.

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Gosh, an integrated ecological approach ... with potential predictive power based on evolution ...Enjoy.

With all this concern about EbolaI would tell you a joke about ebola, but you probably wouldn't get it (ba boom)

You showed the effect of banning the importing of particular species of animals.That doesn't have anything to do with locals hunting native species. Regulation is always possible, but its pointless if it doesn't do anything. As one of your links says:

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In spite of the current ban in the hunting of all species of animals due to their reproduction period, traders in bush meat do not seem bothered by the fact that they are into a forbidden trade.

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Now that doesn't mean you shouldn't try, but as you've seen:

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Tens of millions of Africans rely on bushmeat and wild fish for up to 80 percent of their protein, and recent calls to end the trade in the food because of links to Ebola virus outbreaks could never be enforced, said Robert Nasi, Deputy Director General of the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR).

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He said that people living in Africa’s Congo Basin annually eat about 5 million tons of bushmeat from caterpillars to elephants.

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That’s about the equivalent of the cattle production of Brazil or the European Union. Bushmeat is the cheapest protein available beside caterpillars.

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Nasi who has been studying the bushmeat trade for 10 years said producing the same amount of meat by cattle ranching would require converting up to 25 million hectares of forest into farmland roughly the size of Great Britain. Bushmeat hunting is largely illegal in many countries in Africa, but weak law enforcement undermines any efforts to actually stop the trade. In Cameroon alone, there are believed to be 460,000 hunters.

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Banning bushmeat isn't going to stop bushmeat, too many people depend on it for protein for survival.Too, the alternative to using bushmeat for many of these people is starving to death and I don't think we can reasonable expect them to take the offer, nor should we. "Can be done away with...", that's so naively gullible its cute. Banning things doesn't do away with them. If anything, it pushes it into the shadows. I'm afraid that countries who are too poor to even feed their people will have a much bigger problem with incurring the additional costs of regulating, implementing, and also enforcing a proper sanitation protocol.Again, this may seem like a valiant effort from your vantage point as a rich american who is concerned about a virus, but if you look at it from the perspective of a starving african who is desperately looking for protein, then I think you can realize that they aren't going to give the slightest fuck about your concerns. What, like how shark fin soup is no longer a thing? Or how we've totally eliminated Japanese whaling? I mean, those people aren't even starving and we can't stop them.What makes you think it would be "stopped in its tracks"? Well I think its a waste of time so I'll leave it to you. Personally, I think the best approach is to just wait.The virus will mutate and go the likes of SARS, swine flu and bird flu.They're big deals when they're a hot button in the news, but after some time when the frenzy dies down and the disease changes then it just won't be that big of a deal anymore.

Pretty sure the ban also applied to animals like prairie dogs. But maybe I'm just biased to see the word prairie dog whenever the word prairie dog shows up....

Not "animals like prairie dogs", but the prairie dog explicitly. That was the one non-African animal on the list (it didn't stand out as non-African during my first read). And they were only mentioned because they were the vector for transmission to Americans, not the source of the disease.And the "ban" is actually:

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You must not capture, offer to capture, transport, offer to transport, sell, barter, or exchange, offer to sell, barter, or exchange, distribute, offer to distribute, or release into the environment, any of the following animals, whether dead or alive:

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If you had a prairie dog as a pet, you could keep it. That's hardly a ban on the animal, itself.But regardless, this is still nothing like local people hunting native species for protein to eat.Preventing Americans from trading prairie dogs is nothing like stopping Africans from eating bushmeat.

I keep hitting 'Submit' when I mean to hit 'Preview' and posting only half messages. Here is a fuller reply: Regulation is pointless without enforcement. I don't think I need to tell you that Africa in general has a problem with enforcing its laws (or pretty much anything other than murderous rampages by whacked-out political leaders or tribesmen). Sure; but I don't think a complete ban is the first step and I don't think I've been arguing for a blanket ban. Read carefully: there are countless ways to do away with things that doesn't involve just banning them. A ban would only be one part; there would also be enforcement, education, changes in cultural attitudes, etc.If people stopped believing that playing with animal carcasses improved their spiritual welfare, they'd stop playing with animal carcasses to improve their spiritual welfare. You're missing a lot of details. The issue of people trading in infected bushmeat is more like wealthy corporations dumping toxic chemicals near playgrounds to save a few bucks. People are making money by selling tainted bushmeat to unsuspecting consumers. Whatever the situation, I don't see how you could think it is okay to profit from other people's suffering.

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"Bushmeat Stories: Voices from the Congo Basin" from Our World:

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"I love hunting because I can earn money quickly," he says. "If God helps me today, I can catch some animals, like monkeys, wild boar or antelopes."

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Ekwayoli uses a twig to pin a lethal loop of wire to the ground, then covers it with leaves. A living sapling bent over by another wire provides the spring that pulls the noose tight.

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When he’s hunting, Ekwayoli sets 50 to 100 such traps each day. "I need to leave them alone for two weeks because it takes some time for my human odour to leave the trap," he says.

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The more bushmeat you get, the more money you make. Sounds like a good incentive for selling questionable finds (sick, already dead animals, etc.).That's not okay. No matter how poor the hunters/trappers are. Well, I think it goes without saying that illegal practices will always continue. I mean, there are states that punish people by killing them, and yet folks still go around committing murders in those states. So don't read 'stop in its tracks' too literally.I mean only that the practice will end for those who do not see the benefit worth the risk of punishment. How many people that is is unclear, but it is presumably more than zero. They are always big deals. It's just that no one cares until it has the potential to affect them in some way. I won't try to pretend I am any different. I personally have little interest in the dysfunctional states and cultural practices of other societies in as far as they have no impact on me. Live and let liveif you can.But some people's cultural practices are just crap and have the potential to affect people other than themselves. And I really do mean cultural practices, because bushmeat consumption is not just a necessity-born practice, but is a part of certain African cultures and does not simply disappear when less risky, more affordable alternatives are available:

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Smuggled Bushmeat Is Ebola's Back Door to America from Newsweek:

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Paa George Appiah is from Ghana, but has been living in New York for 10 years. A former GNC employee, he sidesteps questions about his current work status, but is cheery and candid when it comes to bushmeat. "Akarnte is the best, my favorite," he tells us. Akarnte, he explains, is a type of "grass-cutter." His brief curbside mimicry of buckteeth suggests a large rabbit, but the grass-cutter is in fact a large rodent, more commonly called a "cane rat" in the U.S. Cane rats are similar in appearance to a guinea pig, prized as a source of protein throughout Ghana and other parts of West Africa, and officially unavailable anywhere in the United States.

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Bushmeat, which can range from bat to monkey to lion, including a number of endangered species, is beloved by many African-born Americans, despite the fact that it is illegal in the U.S. In the Bronx, the high price (up to $100 for six or seven pounds, Appiah tells us) attached to bushmeat (or viande de brousse, as it is known in the French-speaking world) indicates a luxury indulgence in the same way illegally imported caviar might for Russian migrs in Brooklyn.

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Bushmeat may be a luxury, but it may also pose a deadly threat. A memo obtained by Newsweek that circulated among customs officers and agriculture specialists in 2007 noted that bushmeat is "a potential vector of diseases such as Monkeypox, Ebola Virus, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and other communicable diseases."

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This is why the "people eat bushmeat because they are starving and have no other options" argument is so uncertain. It simply isn't clear that people eat bushmeat only out of necessity and not also out of want. We need evidence to make that claim because it isn't self-evident to anyone but white Europeans (and Americans) who would themselves never eat rats unless they believed it was the only way to keep from starving. Perhaps that's not how people in Africa think; based on behavior we should certainly not assume that it is.We shouldn't assume that everyone thinks like us, and that (flawed) assumption is central to the bulk of your argument.

I think you missed the point: Regulation can change people's behavior regarding their interaction with the natural world and this behavioral change can have an effect on the rate of transmission of diseases from animals to humans. I just gave a pretty simple example. There are plenty of laws that regulate hunting practices and serve to keep animal diseases out of the human population.And since the U.S. isn't suffering any epidemics from zoonotic diseases, I'd say those laws and practices are largely effective.

Here's a piece on bushmeat and Ebola that has a reasonable, balanced view of the subject, and provides some relevant facts.

Is there something in the article you want to discuss in particular?It doesn't seem to me that it offers any more information than we already have in the discussion.

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It doesn't seem to me that it offers any more information than we already have in the discussion.

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It offers links to evidence on the amount of bushmeat consumed and its importance to people living at the edge of subsistence, and provides a clear statement of why simply banning the practice will have no effect and why effectively ending it is extremely difficult.Anyhow, if you have any practical ideas about how to build effective state institutions in West Africa, develop better, sustainable agriculture there and (re)construct their health care and public health systems, have it.