With the sun beating down on the strange and exotic-looking meats on sale — some dripping blood, some heavily smoked and impossible to identify — the sights and sounds at this London market are straight out of Africa.

Skinned goat carcasses dangle overhead, blackened cow heads and lamb brains are lined up in trays, while baskets tucked in darker corners brim with yellowing strips of cured flesh.

Nearby, women hawk spices, cassava and yams, as men in shacks offer cheap airline tickets to Nigeria, Ghana and Cameroon, as well as cash transfers back to family members still living on the continent.

At Lagos restaurant, just past ‘Monni Matters’ foreign exchange and the ‘God Is Good Hair Salon’, there is nothing fancy about the cheap seats and chipped tables — but what’s on the menu is a taste of home.

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Exotic foods: London's Ridley Road Market, where bush meat has been sold, though none of those pictured here are involved

At £5 a plate, dishes include Nkwobi, a traditional meal of spiced cow feet and ‘assorted meat and fish’ with pounded yam, through to giant African snails, served as part of a ‘designer stew’ with, again, unnamed ‘assorted meats’.

The scene — at Ridley Road in Dalston, East London, an area with a large African community — is replicated at similar markets in many British towns and cities, and is part of the daily ebb and flow of people and goods between the African continent and Europe.

Indeed, with flights from West Africa taking fewer than eight hours, traders boast that much of their produce is ‘fresh’ from the country of origin.

Infectious: Scientists in Africa are trying to isolate the killer Ebola virus. Bush meat is one of the primary sources of the disease’s transmission

Yet for all the sunshine, bustle and sound of African voices, the butchers here were oddly tense this week, not to mention strangely reluctant to discuss certain choice cuts of meat.

The reason? Ridley Road has been identified as a hub for the secret market in ‘bush meat’ — the flesh of exotic animals such as chimpanzee, monkey, porcupine, fruit bats and even giraffe, slaughtered in the African bush and smuggled into Britain.

It is estimated that a staggering 7,500 tonnes of illegal meat enters Britain each year, the bulk of which is bush meat.

The trade has hitherto been defended on cultural grounds, as little different to Britons eating rabbit or venison. But it is now at the centre of a terrifying health crisis.

For we are in the midst of the worst outbreak in history of the deadly Ebola virus — and bush meat is one of the primary sources of the disease’s transmission.

Spread through the blood and body fluids of infected people and animals, Ebola’s latest outbreak began in February in Guinea and has so far claimed more than 700 lives.

With no cure, there are growing fears that the movement of people and goods between Africa and Europe will make it all too easy for Ebola to wreak death and havoc around the world.

And the underground trade in bush meat may be the channel by which the UK is most vulnerable to an Ebola outbreak.

Having lived in Africa and travelled the continent for 20 years, I have been offered everything from elephant meat to monkey and lion steaks, and the markets selling this bush meat are still flourishing.

With no cure, there are growing fears that the movement of people and goods between Africa and Europe will make it all too easy for Ebola to wreak death and havoc around the world. Above, the Ebola virus

But the appetite for such delicacies has also spread dramatically from Africa, to Europe and the U.S.

The reason this gives such cause for concern is that ever since the Ebola virus was discovered, deep in the forests of the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1976, scientists have warned it can pass from animals to humans who prepare or eat infected meat.

A 1996 outbreak in Gabon was caused when local people ate the fresh body of a dead chimpanzee they found in the bush.

Disturbingly, one of the hosts of the disease in the latest outbreak is the forest fruit bat, sold as bush meat all over West Africa and made into a popular spicy stew called kedjenou.

The bats are also hunted and eaten by some large animals such as baboons, which, again, are sold as part of the vast global trade in bush meat.

Five previous outbreaks have been linked to the handling of meat from gorillas, chimps and duikers (a small antelope) for the bush meat business — and all these animals have been found for sale in the UK.

Heathrow baggage handlers frequently complain about foul-smelling packages, some seeping blood, as couriers arrive with their goods from Africa.

But their tip-offs present no significant hindrance to the trade, as the UK’s over-stretched customs officers focus their resources on drugs and terrorist activities.

Meat is also brought into the country through the Channel Tunnel after being flown to Paris, a major hub for flights from Africa.

Above, medical personnel take care of Ebola patients in Kennema, Sierra Leone. Five previous outbreaks have been linked to the handling of meat from gorillas, chimps and duikers (a small antelope) for the bush meat business — and all these animals have been found for sale in the UK

Which brings us to back to the bustle of Ridley Road. Here, the risk posed to public health from bush meat comes as no surprise to Dr Yunes Teinaz, a former environment health official for the area.

For years, he has been warning that the bush meat trade is a time-bomb owing to the sheer size of the business and the fact that the meat is sold without any of the safety tests demanded by law.

He has, as a result, been targeted for revenge attacks by the gangs controlling the trade.

‘I’m horrified and disappointed by what has been allowed to go on,’ he told me. ‘I warned about this many years ago, but local authorities are still not taking any action.

‘This meat is sold everywhere. It’s smuggled in vast quantities. It’s supplied all around Britain. It poses a potentially huge risk to public health, yet we are doing nothing to tackle it.’

It was two years ago that a BBC programme revealed that giant rats smuggled from Africa were among the items on sale at Ridley Road market.

A year earlier, trading standards officials testing meat samples, believed to be seized from vendors in the Midlands, realised they were handling chimpanzee flesh.

Dr Teinaz believes there should be a full government inquiry into the scale of the scandal, scoffing at claims by health inspectors that they check African markets regularly to ensure there is no bush meat being sold.

‘You can’t just walk up as a white person and ask to buy bush meat,’ he said.

‘You need to be an African and speak the language, and then it’s easy. You can get monkey heads, animal blood used in rituals — all smuggled in without any health checks. You can place orders at these African markets and they will deliver to your home.

‘This is very big business and people are smart — they will think you are an inspector or the police if you just start asking around.’

Perhaps this explains the reaction when, during a shopping expedition to Ridley Road this week, I asked for ‘special meat’ at a number of stalls. The so-called ‘code’ did not work: one Ghanaian shopkeeper became angry and agitated, turning his back and telling me to go away because ‘we only sell cassava here’, referring to the starchy vegetable that’s a staple of tropical diets.

Yet, for all the reticence and secrecy, everyone knows what goes on.

A woman running a stall selling wigs, who came to London from Nigeria 20 years ago, confirmed that many of her fellow Africans buy bush meat from the market.

‘I often get a craving for it,’ she admitted. ‘You used to get it everywhere here, but it’s gone underground now.

‘I don’t have a problem with people eating it — you eat deer and rabbits and other creatures.’ This trader told me, however, that she would no longer buy bush meat because of the Ebola terror.

‘That’s always been my only objection — on health grounds,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t risk it.’

‘Bush meat is like drugs — you can get it everywhere if you know the right people, but you won’t see it openly on sale

But not all share her caution. One shopkeeper, outside a stall named two years ago as a supplier of bush meat, insisted that there was nothing wrong with it — though he swore he did not sell such products.

‘Everybody knows where you can get it,’ he told me. ‘Bush meat is like drugs — you can get it everywhere if you know the right people, but you won’t see it openly on sale. It’s word of mouth and under-the-counter deals.’

Certainly, that is the modus operandi of one man involved in the trade. This Nigerian butcher agreed to meet me in a cafe away from the market, and made a spirited, if dangerously ignorant, defence of his business.

‘A lot of people believe bush meat is magical,’ he told me. ‘But meat is meat. People in Britain are only against it because nobody pays any taxes.’

Insisting he did not eat bush meat himself, he told me that hunting and eating wild animals was part of his culture.

‘We grew up doing it — it was normal,’ he said. ‘That’s why people think it’s normal here to eat their food from home, just like Brits want baked beans or ketchup when they live abroad.’

As for attempts to end the trade at its source, they seem doomed for a number of reasons, even despite the threat posed by Ebola.

With countries such as Liberia, Ivory Coast and Sierra Leone trying to introduce local bans on bush meat to halt the spread of the virus, people are simply refusing to stop the practice.

Bush meat is, in fact, booming in popularity among Africans, encouraged by proclamations by some of their leaders to reject western ways.

For instance, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, there have even been calls from nationalists for foreign cuisine to be replaced with ‘typically African’ dishes such as chimpanzee, served as ‘les cousins’ to human diners.

With bush meat costing more than chicken or beef in some African cities, it has also become a status symbol for richer Africans, many of whom believe the attributes of the animals they eat will pass to them.

The number of animals being killed is staggering, with conservation groups warning that millions of tonnes of meat are being taken from Africa’s forests.

‘You will not stop it [the trade] — I just think it’s futile,’ said Bob Swanepoel, a virologist at the University of Pretoria in South Africa.