Africa's bushmeat trade poses major zoonotic risks, yet health assessments remain largely unmeasured

Across tropical Africa, millions of people hunt, sell, and consume wild animals as bushmeat—a practice woven into cultural tradition and economic survival. The trade moves through remote forests and urban markets, connecting hunters to butchers to sellers to families at dinner tables. Along every step of that chain, people touch blood, handle carcasses, and prepare meat with bare hands. The risk of disease spillover is real. Ebola, Mpox, HIV—these viruses have jumped from animals to humans through bushmeat. Yet when researchers set out to measure how dangerous this trade actually is, they discovered something troubling: almost nobody has tried.

A systematic review published in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases examined 129 peer-reviewed studies on health risks in Africa's bushmeat trade. The researchers, led by Amougou and colleagues, searched two major databases and combed through nearly 450 initial records to understand what scientists actually know about the probability of disease transmission through bushmeat handling and consumption. What they found was a landscape of fragmented, reactive research—studies that identified hazards but almost never quantified the actual risk.

The 129 studies identified 66 confirmed human pathogens in bushmeat: 23 viruses, 19 bacteria, and 24 parasites. Researchers found evidence of Ebola, simian immunodeficiency viruses, Mpox, and dozens of other agents capable of infecting people. But here is the critical gap: not a single study performed a formal quantitative health risk assessment. None established a probability. None weighed likelihood against exposure. None provided the kind of numerical foundation that public health authorities need to prepare, to allocate resources, to warn communities, or to guide policy. The research was dominated by interviews about behavior and perception—44.8% of studies relied on this method alone—rather than direct detection of pathogens. Only 40% of studies even attempted to identify pathogens in bushmeat samples.

The research itself was concentrated in three countries: Cameroon, Nigeria, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. This clustering was not random. It followed epidemic events. When Ebola or Mpox erupted, researchers descended. When the outbreak faded, so did the attention. Over 88% of studies failed to report basic methodological details like survey effort—how many days of fieldwork, how many sites visited, how many samples collected. Without this information, other scientists cannot assess whether findings are reliable or reproducible. Most studies lasted only about two months. Three-quarters examined a single type of location. Nearly all focused on national rather than international trade, even though bushmeat moves across borders and oceans, reaching Europe and North America in significant volumes.

The human dimension of this gap is stark. Hunters in remote forests encounter fresh carcasses and blood during the kill and butchering—the highest-risk moment for direct transmission. Butchers in markets handle contaminated materials daily. Sellers and consumers in urban centers face different but real exposures. Rural communities, already facing poverty and food insecurity, depend on bushmeat for protein and income. Yet the scientific understanding of who is exposed, how often, and to what degree remains almost entirely unmeasured. The bushmeat trade is largely informal and illegal, which means it operates in shadow. Stakeholders distrust outsiders. Researchers cannot easily access hunting sites. Supply chains are opaque. These practical obstacles are real. But they do not explain the absence of quantitative risk assessment. The deeper problem is that formal quantification requires data that simply does not exist: pathogen prevalence in wild animals, dose-response relationships, frequency of human exposure across the supply chain, and the ecological factors that influence spillover. Without these parameters, the mathematical models that public health uses elsewhere—in food safety, in occupational health, in pandemic preparedness—cannot be applied.

The authors conclude that robust risk quantification is currently unfeasible. To change this, they argue, the bushmeat trade must be formally recognized and regulated by national authorities. This means mapping supply chains, identifying critical control points where exposure can be measured, integrating molecular surveillance of pathogens, and adopting what is called a One Health framework—simultaneous monitoring of wildlife, vectors, and humans at the animal-human interface. It means treating bushmeat not as an invisible informal economy but as a legitimate sector worthy of structured oversight. Only then can the probability of spillover be measured, understood, and managed. Until that happens, Africa's bushmeat trade remains a documented threat with an unmeasured cost.