Wasington Post July 21
China’s push to export traditional medicine may doom the magical pangolin
by Simon Denyer
In a rescue center, the pangolin slowly wakes and uncurls, sniffing out a nighttime feast of ants’ eggs, then lapping it up with its implausibly long tongue. One of 74 pangolins rescued from the back of a truck in Vietnam in April, its survival has defied the odds.
This almost mystical creature, looking like a cross between an anteater and an armadillo but unrelated to either, is the world’s most trafficked mammal: A million of them are thought to have been poached from the wild in just a decade.
Already almost wiped out in China, the pangolin is fast disappearing from the jungles of the rest of Asia and, increasingly, from Africa to supply China’s booming market in traditional medicine.
Now, as China pushes to export traditional medicine around the world under the umbrella of its Belt and Road investment plan, many wildlife experts fear that the animal faces extinction — unless something changes very soon....
The air of mystery attaching to the reclusive pangolin has been its downfall, sparking an unjustified belief that its scales have magical medicinal properties. In hospitals and pharmacies across China and Vietnam, powder made from pangolin scales is prescribed for an impossibly wide range of ailments, including rheumatism, wound infections, skin disorders, coronary heart disease and even cancer.
Mothers take powdered pangolin scales to help them lactate, while men drink pangolin blood or consume fetuses in the belief that this will make them more virile....
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/chinas-push-to-export-traditional-medicine-may-doom-the-magical-pangolin/2018/07/20/8d8c52d4-7ef1-11e8-a63f-7b5d2aba7ac5_story.html