Potential Pathogens Reported in Species of the Family Viverridae and Their Implications for Human and Animal Health

Wicker, L. V.; Canfield, P. J.; Higgins, D. P.

Maintenance of wild species in captivity provides another opportunity for unnatural human-wildlife proximity, facilitating interspecies sharing of organisms (Daszak et al., 2001) . Viverrids are kept in captivity in zoos (Cosson et al., 2007) , conservation breeding programmes for threatened species (Roberton et al., 2002) and, in far greater numbers, on commercial wildlife farms. Civets have traditionally been farmed for their fur (Shi and Hu, 2008) and to supply the demand for 'civet' scent (used in the production of perfume), a practice which drives farming of civets in Ethiopia (Tolosa and Regassa, 2007) and India (Balakrishnan and Sreedevi, 2007) . More recently, farming of civet in Asia has expanded to supply a growing demand for their meat in wildlife restaurants and markets (Patou et al., 2009) . While published data on wildlife farming are scant, the number of individual civets on farms is likely to be large by 2003, 40,000 individual civets were registered on farms in China (Patou et al., 2009) . Another growing industry is the production of civet coffee, where coffee beans are fed to civets and subsequently harvested, undigested, from their faeces. Traditionally collected from the faeces of free-ranging animals in the vicinity of coffee farms, coffee producers are increasingly turning to caged production to satisfy demand for this product, which has the dubious distinction of being the 'world's most expensive coffee' (D'Cruze et al., 2014; Techangamsuwan et al., 2014) .