Convocation Newsletter, Spring 2019

Respect Animals, Save Human Lives Yuen Kwok-yung | Medicine Photo: Anthony Fan 范家朗 (BSc (Surv) 2018) “S eventy-five percent of emerging infectious agents are coming from animals. These include the bird flu, SARS, MERS and Rat hepatitis E virus,” said Professor Yuen Kwok-yung 袁國勇 (MBBS 1981; MD 1998), Henry Fok Professor in Infectious Diseases and Chair of Infectious Diseases in the Department of Microbiology at the Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine. Professor Yuen, an international expert in animal-borne illness, has been advocating improving human wealth by promoting animal hygiene and welfare. “When we care for livestock and respect wildlife, both animals and humans benefit,” he said. After the 2003 SARS epidemic, he and his team discovered that Chinese horseshoe bats (Rhinolophus sinicus) are the natural reservoir that carried the ancestral bat SARS coronavirus, which may have mutated and spread to civets before jumping into humans. He called on the public to refrain from eating civets, which were considered a delicacy in Southern China. “It would be important for us to respect the habitats of wild animals; maintain good farm and market biosecurity with no live poultry in the wet market in the long run; and control the rat and mosquito populations in the urban area,” Professor Yuen said. “Besides doing microbial surveillance, we have to research for broad spectrum antiviral drugs and universal vaccines to prepare for coming epidemics.” For more than a decade, Professor Yuen has spoken out against live poultry sales and slaughtering at wet markets. He called the practice and conditions of keeping live chickens at the markets “abnormal”. His research on animal-borne diseases dates back to the 1997 avian influenza outbreak, when his research on the H5N1 virus’ severity and mortality rate was published in The Lancet. In February 2019, he warned that even healthy adults could be at risk of rat-to-human hepatitis E infection after Canada reported the first such case outside of Hong Kong. In 2018, Professor Yuen’s team revealed that world’s first two rat-to- human infections took place in Hong Kong, shedding light on hygiene problems in dense urban areas where animals and humans live side by side.