Attitudes towards Wildlife Consumption inside and outside Hubei Province, China, in Relation to the SARS and COVID-19 Ou
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Attitudes towards Wildlife Consumption inside and outside Hubei Province, China, in Relation to the SARS and COVID-19 Outbreaks Shuchang Liu 1 & Zheng Feei Ma 2
&
Yutong Zhang 3 & Yingfei Zhang 4
Accepted: 3 November 2020 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract We designed a self-administered 20-item questionnaire to determine changes in attitudes towards wildlife consumption in Chinese adults during the SARS epidemic in 2002–2003 and on-going COVID-19 pandemic that was first identified in December 2019. A total of 348 adults (177 males and 171 females) with a mean age of 29.4 ± 8.5 years participated, the majority (66.7%) from Hubei. The percentages of participants who had eaten wildlife significantly decreased from 27.0% during SARS to 17.8% during COVID-19 (P = 0.032). The most common reason participants provided for consuming wildlife was to try something novel (64.9% during SARS and 54.8% during COVID-19). More than half of participants (≥53.5%) reported that they had stopped eating wildlife meat because most species of wildlife are legally protected. Our study results indicate over the period between the SARS epidemic to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, attitudes towards the consumption of wildlife in China have changed significantly. Keywords Wildlife consumption . Wet markets . Ecology . COVID-19 . SARS . Hubei Province, China
Introduction In November 2002, an epidemic of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) centred in Foshan municipality, Guangdong Province, was identified, which peaked in February 2003 (Evans et al. 2003). Early cases reported that patients positive for SARS lived near animal markets, and nearly half of them were food practitioners who had contact with animal products. After 17 years, in December 2019, a novel coronavirus pneumonia outbreak was reported in Wuhan, Hubei Province (Fig. 1). The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak was traced to the Huanan seafood market, and most of the early diagnosed patients had been to the local fish and wildlife market before the outbreak (Lu et al.
* Zheng Feei Ma [email protected] 1
School of Biosciences, University of Nottingham, Loughborough LE12 5RD, UK
2
Department of Health and Environmental Sciences, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, Suzhou 215123, Jiangsu, China
3
Jinzhou Medical University, Jinzhou 121001, Liaoning, China
4
Mathematics Teaching and Research Office, Public Basic College, Jinzhou Medical University, Jinzhou 121001, Liaoning, China
2020). The fish and wildlife market also sold live animals such as poultry, bats, marmots, hedgehogs, badgers, birds, and snakes (Lu et al. 2020; Wu et al. 2020). Since both outbreaks have been linked to wildlife markets (Li and Davey 2013; Lu et al. 2020; Wu et al. 2020), it is important to explore the changes of attitude towards eating wildlife before and after the two outbreaks in the general population. Both the SARS and the on-going COVID-19 outbreaks have had extremely negative impacts worldwide. The World Health Org
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