Enforcement of current wildlife protection policy and continued community infrastructure development appears to significantly reduce high-risk contact between humans, wildlife and livestock. Closer collaboration between local animal and human health authorities within the current epidemic disease prevention programmes will provide educational and training opportunities to promote risk-mitigation knowledge, skills and best practice in local communities. For example, cave monitoring and management is a low-cost and efficient method to help restrict human activities (e.g. recreation and mining) that lead to contact with bats in caves. This is of particular importance given the emergence of 2019-nCoV, which appears likely to be a bat-origin coronavirus.10,11