New animal quarantine law significant progress

On Friday, the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress, the nation's top legislature, passed the newly amended Animal Quarantine Law, which will come into effect on May 1.

The law covers all livestock and animals raised or captured by humans. It divides animal diseases into three kinds and requires a mandatory quarantine of animals that potentially threaten agriculture and human health.

The first improvement lies in the regulation of dog owners. According to the revised law, any person or organization who raises a dog must ensure the animal is routinely vaccinated, and register the vaccination certificate. Also, when walking a dog outdoors, the dog should have a valid registration card attached to its collar, and it should be kept on a leash to prevent it hurting anyone or spreading diseases.

The move is expected to help eliminate rabies, as dogs are the primary carriers of the virus. In people, rabies has a death rate of almost 100 percent, the highest mortality rate of any disease. However, in certain developed countries such as Japan, there have long been no new cases of humans being infected with the rabies virus because it is written in law that pet dogs must have the rabies vaccine.

It is a consensus among the majority of animal researchers that it is more effective to vaccinate dogs rather than humans.

Another significant measure in the revised law is the stipulation that wild animals must undergo quarantine. For a long time, the lack of quarantine standards for wild animals has been a major shortcoming in epidemic control. Who is responsible for carrying out the quarantine? What to do if someone captures a wild animal? What standards should be followed?

The newly amended law has made it clear that the agricultural and wild animal protection departments of the State Council, China's Cabinet, must work together to ensure wild animals complete the specified quarantine period. That is the right move, as it ensures that professionals are responsible for ensuring wild animals complete the mandatory quarantine.

A third, but no less significant change, is that if anyone hopes to utilize wild animals for purposes such as research, pharmaceutical products or exhibition, they must apply for animal health monitoring institutions to do the quarantine. Also those who capture wild animals must also undergo quarantine before raising or transporting them.

Do not forget in these processes wild animals could have contact with humans, putting them at the risk of exposure to zoonotic diseases.

－SUN BAOJUN, A RESEARCH FELLOW AT INSTITUTE OF ZOOLOGY, CHINESE ACADEMY OF SCIENCES