After Its Epidemic Arrival, SARS Vanishes - New York Times

After Its Epidemic Arrival, SARS Vanishes - New York Times: "Scientists agree that SARS jumped from animals to humans, probably in wildlife markets in the region around Guangzhou, where workers live near the animals they slaughter and sell."

This article highlights the role of the wildlife trade in disease emergence. I would hypothesize that events like SARS emergence will continue happen. Although SARS itself seems to have been controlled, the conditions that led to its emergence still exist, and not just in Asia but globally. Emergence of many of the infectious diseases that have become important in the last century was facilitated by the local, regional, and international trade and consumption in wildlife: HIV/AIDS, Ebola, Marburg, SARS, avian influenza ... and the list goes on. And the scary thing is that there are many other viruses out there that could potentially cross the species barrier into humans. For example, from Peeters et al. (2002) : "These data document for the first time that a substantial proportion of wild monkeys in Cameroon are SIV infected and that humans who hunt and handle bushmeat are exposed to a plethora of genetically highly divergent viruses.". SIV is a closely related virus to HIV that affects primates.

The wildlife trade has long been known to be one of the major threats to biodiversity, but thanks to our increasing ability to get things around the planet very quickly, the international wildlife trade forms a major threat to human health. If conservation doesn't get governments to notice, maybe the threat of another SARS epidemic will.