Footage Shows Illegal Food Markets Selling 'High-Risk' Wildlife Animals Amid Coronavirus Pandemic

Alarming undercover footage has revealed how overseas food markets are still selling 'high-risk' wildlife, despite Asian governments claiming they've been shut down because of the coronavirus pandemic.

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The deadly virus is thought to have originated and spread from animals to humans at a marketplace in Wuhan, in China's Hubei province - the epicentre of the outbreak that's killed more than 3,600 people globally and three in Australia.

As Australia's confirmed cases reached 81 on Sunday, environmental investigator Steven Galster went undercover to Bangkok's Chatuchak wildlife market, which he said has the potential to spark a 'second Wuhan'.

Mr Galster, along with 60 Minutes reporter Liam Bartlett, exposed the hot, cramped and filthy conditions wildlife are placed in after being smuggled from around the globe and being sold as food at the market.

'I think this place is a torture chamber and a filthy laboratory all mixed into one,' Mr Galster said while walking through the markets.

'[The animals] have all been pulled from their natural environments and brought thousands of miles in cages all the way here in contaminated conditions, bringing with them God knows what.

'With literally thousands of people [at the market] it's the perfect storm for the Wuhan thing to happen again right here.'

In a desperate bid to stop the spread of the coronavirus, China has closed more than 20,000 'wet markets' - which sell fresh, and often alive, meat and seafood.

But markets being run by crime syndicates are still selling off animals across Asia with impunity.

'We know who the syndicates are, we've been following them for years. And they're not going to close down business today because China closed down Wuhan,' Mr Galster said.

'They're like drug dealers. If you make it difficult to sell drugs in one neighbourhood, they're going to move to another neighbourhood.'

The covert footage showed cramped cages full of blue-tongued lizards, iguanas, monkeys, Australian cockatoos, African meerkats, ferrets, rare tortoises, porcupines, snakes and skunks, among others.

But because such animals are never together in the wild, Mr Galster said they are particularly vulnerable to viruses.

While being kept in squalid conditions at the markets, those viruses can leap to humans who handle them.

Mr Galster believes Chatuchak is 'Wuhan in the making' and said environmental rights teams have asked Thailand to shut the markets down.

'It's a prescription for disaster, all within this small, hot room ready to infect somebody,' he said.

Mr Galster said not just Chinese wildlife markets should be shut down, but also illegal trading hubs in Indonesia, Laos, Cambodia and Burma.

While experts at this stage aren't certain of how the outbreak started, coronavirus is believed to have originated at a wildlife market in China's Wuhan.

It is suspected the virus crossed to humans from the pangolin - a type of scaly anteater - which is the most trafficked wild animal in the world.

'It's a wild animal that's been taken out of its natural environment, consumed in some way, come into contact with people in an unnatural way,' Mr Galster said.

'I think the pangolin… whose only defence is to curl up into a ball, has decided that conservationists weren't doing enough, it struck back itself.

'I think this is mother nature's revenge. We're not surprised. We've been working on this for years, and we're trying to warn people that this is global.

'There are sleeping time bombs across the region right now.'

Professor Gabriel Leung, chair of public health medicine at Hong Kong University, said animals in distress being handled by workers would most likely have caused the jump from wildlife to humans.

'You have animals under stress. Therefore their immune system is down, and through the handling process - including slaughter - that's when the highest risk of jumping from animals to humans would have occurred,' he said.

Prof Leung, who is an expert on coronavirus epidemics and led the global fight against SARS, said COVID-19 is 'certainly more infective than SARS'.

'The big unknown now is really how big is the iceberg,' he told 60 Minutes.

There have now been more than 106,000 confirmed cases around the world, and nearly 3600 people have died since the start of the outbreak in December.

'I don't know, but I'm suspecting that (there are many more people infected),' he said.

'Everybody is susceptible. If you assume that everybody randomly mix with each other, then eventually you will see 40, 50, 60 per cent of the population get infected.'

That could mean between 45 and 60 million people will die globally in the first wave alone.

'We have to prepare for that possibility that there is a second wave,' he said.

Professor Leung said it was likely there were many more undetected cases.

'For every death you would expect to see 80 to 100 cases,' he said.

'So if you start seeing deaths first before you start picking up large numbers of cases the only conclusion that one can reasonably and scientifically draw is that you hadn't been testing nearly early enough or extensively enough. Unless you go and test, you're not going to find.'

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