Close live animal markets to protect New Yorkers’ health

New guidance from the World Health Organization is calling for the sale of wild animals to be suspended in live animal markets to help prevent emerging infectious disease outbreaks.

Many people, however, don’t realize that the danger is not limited to China’s markets or to contact with bats and civets. There is potentially greater danger right under our noses here in New York, where more than 80 live animal markets — which slaughter chickens and other animals — are in operation.

A year ago, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said of wet markets in China, “It just boggles my mind that when we have so many diseases that emanate out of that unusual human-animal interface that we don’t just shut it down.”

In April 2020, a bipartisan group of 66 members of Congress, including New York's John Katko, sent a letter to WHO, the United Nations, and the World Organization for Animal Health calling for the closure of live animal markets. It stated, “As this pandemic continues to threaten the lives of millions, pushes healthcare systems to the breaking point, and devastates economies around the world, it is imperative that we all take action as a global community to protect public health.”

Last spring, the New York Legislature introduced a bill that would eliminate live animal markets in the state. In the

meantime, New York extended a law that prohibits New York City from issuing new licenses to operate live poultry markets and slaughterhouses within 1,500 feet of residential buildings for the next four years. The law, passed in 2016, describes the potential health threats not just from viruses, but from respiratory hazards for those who live near the markets:

“Often, markets failed to properly dispose of animal entrails, which created undesirable conditions in the streets and on the sidewalks of the city. Floating feathers clogged sewer drains and air conditioning/heating ducts and presented asthma, allergy and respiratory hazards. … Lack of monitoring [by state and city inspectors] became especially frightening in light of Mad Cow disease and recent outbreaks of avian influenza (‘bird flu’).”

Avian viruses have been the source of many of the last century’s pandemics. The 1918 flu pandemic originated in birds and killed more people than the First World War. It mutated with another strain of bird flu to cause the 1957 pandemic, which killed two to four million people (eight times the normal annual flu death rate). That strain mutated with yet another strain of bird flu to cause the 1968 flu pandemic, which killed one million people.

Perhaps the most terrifying potential pandemic currently being tracked by epidemiologists is the H5N1 influenza, which raced through U.S. poultry flocks multiple times in the 1990s and early 2000s, leading to massive culls. Thankfully there have been only a small number of human fatalities because unlike COVID-19, the H5N1 virus does not transmit easily from person to person. Nonetheless, nearly two-thirds of people who have caught H5N1 have died of it. In the words of Albertus Osterhaus, one of Europe's top virologists, “If this [H5N1 bird flu] adapts to humans, it could be really bad. Civilization ending.” And yet live animal markets in New York, where poultry is the main commodity, continue to operate.

Passing New York’s bill A3629/S3182 is a critical first step not only in protecting New Yorkers from the risks posed by live animal markets, but toward reducing the risk of another global pandemic. As the COVID-19 pandemic persists, swift passage of this measure should become a priority for the state.