Unable to put beef and fish on the table, Africa courts animal-spread diseases

• Over 60 per cent of estimated 1,415 infectious diseases known to modern medicine are capable of infecting both animals and humans
• Livestock agriculture is the most important industry across sub-Saharan Africa, and disease is its biggest enemy.

These vast forest areas harbour various monkey and antelope species. But its Africa’s highly endangered Great Apes: gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos whose very existence is being severely affected by the bush meat trade.

Recent scientific surveys of great ape populations in Gabon, which has one of the largest populations, indicates that the numbers of gorillas and chimpanzees declined by more than half between 1983 and 2000. But it is not only the bush meat trade that has decimated the ape population of West and Central Africa. Ebola has killed tens of thousands of gorillas and chimpanzees.

But the bush meat trade in sub-Saharan Africa has also been linked to the decline of fish stocks in West Africa. According to experts people substitute wildlife for fish in ears of fish scarcity. In 2005 researchers found that declining fish stocks were fuelling a multibillion- dollar meat trade in West Africa.

In Ghana more than half of the country’s 20 million people reside within 100 kilometres of the coast, where fish is the primary source of protein and income. However, using 30-year data collected monthly by rangers in six nature reserves in Ghana, researchers have found a direct link between fish supply and the demand for bush meat in Ghanaian villages.

Looking at data for the years 1970 to 1998, researchers found that in 14 local food markets, residents substituted bush meat as an alternative to fish and the number of poachers observed by rangers in parks increased when fish supply was limited or its price increased.

During the same period trawler surveys conducted in the Gulf of Guinea, off Ghana’s coast, since 1970 along with other regional stock assessments, estimate that fish biomass in near-shore and off-shore waters has declined by at least 50 per cent.

In the same period, there has been a threefold increase in human population in the region. The researchers suspect the decline in the availability of fish at local Ghanaian markets is linked to heavy over-fishing in the Gulf of Guinea.

The Gulf of Guinea is one of the most over fished areas of the world. Declines in fish stocks in waters off West Africa have coincided with more than ten-fold increases in regional fish harvests by foreign and domestic fleets since 1950.

Shipping fleets subsided by the European Union (EU) have consistently had the largest foreign presence off West Africa, with EU fish harvests there increasing 20 times from 1950 to 2001.

As the outbreaks of zoonotic diseases increase, indigenous Africans (and others communities in developing countries) might hold the key to disease prevention and containment.

Some pioneers in the field of modern medical anthropology agree that the global fight against emerging zoonotic diseases as well as re-emerging contagious and infectious ailments in Sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere has failed to incorporate traditional African medicine for disease control and prevention.

This negative attitude towards indigenous notions of contagious diseases stems largely from the assumption that African health beliefs are primarily based on witchcraft, sorcery or black magic. Experts have indeed found this to be true in the realm of mental illness in sub-Saharan Africa (perhaps due to a superficial likeness between possession by spirits and symptoms of some mental illnesses) but curiously not so when it comes to infectious diseases.

“Western medical science has long dismissed African indigenous (and by extension, other indigenous) medical theories as superstitious gibberish, unworthy of serious consideration,” writes anthropologist Edward C. Green, now a Senior Research Scientist at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies.

The attitudes of the Western medical fraternity as well as Western-trained African healthcare workers will only hamper current efforts to control and prevention of the spread of the latest zoonotic threat to the African continent, Avian Influenza. So far only 40 Africans are known to have been infected with the potentially fatal disease.

However, a recent report by Folorunso O. Fasina and colleagues in The Lancet Infectious Diseases says that Africa is incapable of fighting an Avian Influenza epidemic. According to the report the African strain of H5N1 has acquired “troubling” properties such as respiratory rather than faecal transmission in poultry and a mutation associated with increased spread of disease in mammals, including humans. Furthermore, the possibility of human infection on the continent is increased by inefficient diagnosis, denial of outbreaks, inter-ethnic crisis, politicisation of the issue, poor reporting surveillance and communication risks.