It's also a result of people, around the world (but mostly in China), buying into Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). It creates a market for products based on wild animals like bats and pangolins, which this virus originated from.
There are major efforts in Taiwan's universities to reinterpret TCM with contemporary science methodology. In term of manufacturing, the process is very far from the image of a "wet market". Acupuncture & Tuina, as part of TCM, have been applied on athletes around the world.
Due to my first hand account of TCM, I'm unable to dismiss TCM just as easily as you.
One thing I like to point out though, Taiwan's regulations on wild life and traditional medicine may be what China currently needs to curtail future potential outbreaks. As you know, TCM is tremendously popular in Taiwan yet Taiwan doesn't produce outbreaks like its neighbors does.
but don't confound my pessimism with giving up, I sincerely hope we'll gain the upper hand, but it will require a lot of work to get there.
The CCP is the one that needs to be made responsible. However, they will label any attempt from the west as racism towards the Chinese, to avoid having to take up that responsibility.
Change will only happen when it doesn't look like the CCP is losing face by listening to what the west is dictating. Economic sanctions are the alternative, but that would threaten the supply of cheap Chinese labor.
E. Coli comes from faecal contamination so someone's been pooping in America's leafy greens for years. Not sure there's a whole lot of moral high-ground there.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/ecoli/2019/o157h7-11-19/index.html
[2] https://www.healthline.com/health-news/spinach-recalled-over...
Wet markets have been known to a problem for over a decade, nothing was done until after this crisis started.
[0] https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/publications/37404/11780_ld... [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2020-coronavirus-pandemic...
The economic damage is going to be at least a 1000 times worse.
However, when it comes to the question of responsibility for preventing a third SARS outbreak originating from China, the answer lies with the CCP.
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/01/world/asia/china-coronavi...
The CCP is a political party whose sole interest is in consolidating power.
If that's anything to go by, we're fucked when it comes to climate change.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-it-all-started-chinas-early...
The people peddling this stuff either either know it doesn’t work or they have no idea if it works or even harms their patients.
They’re charlatans and it’s one driver for extinction worldwide.
It’s the same kind of pernicious, regressive meme as the western “wellness” industry and we should all be scared of it.
It hides all the times these plants had no effect or a negative effect.
Either these plants you speak of are effective and their efficacy can be demonstrated repeatedly using trials or they’re not and someone is selling superstition.
That’s still a choice between medicine and not medicine.
Or better than shaming is actual penalties. Maybe we ban wet markets and blacklist nations who allow them.
This author is painting a picture of wet market like it's some kind of seedy underground butcher shop, but the reality is that this is how places like New York or London were selling groceries and food just a hundred years ago. It's just a regular market before the age of super markets.
Or put more simply: we no-longer have to, and no-longer choose to accept that a percentage of humans are culled from time to time. We cherish and protect even our weakest.
2. Wet markets actually serve an important role in the local economies of markets where supermarkets are not easily accessible. Actually, we still have wet-markets in the US and Europe and we love them. They're called fish markets, where local fishermen sell their daily catch directly consumers, and they would kill and clean animals right in front of buyers. We have no grievances with that, and chefs often recommend them to people. The difference between these wet markets and the ones we see in China is regulated standards, so that's a big area of improvement.
> could have happened anywhere
Yes, in the same sense that anyone can win a lottery. But don't get innumeracy here. China is huge and the combinatorics of wet market contamination push it several orders of magnitude in probability away from any other place on the earth. Yes, even from African bush meat markets.
> This is a direct consequence of their agricultural practices
... of wild meat being disproportionately supported by the government.
> if a little bit of cultural shaming works towards preventing the next pandemic, then I think that's pretty well worth it at this point.
I'm not entirely sure why race and racism keep coming up in this discussion. It has nothing to do with race, only nation state and culture, sanitation and biology.
But sure, ok.
The problem with those wet markets, just like with bush meat in Africa, is that they promote new types of viruses. Fixing those markets is not going to stop all new diseases, but it will prevent some of the most dangerous to emerge.
The main concern here is that the issue has been long known, and unlike poor, wild Africa where taking action is nearly impossible due to severe economic and political difficulties, the Chinese dictatorship's inaction was avoidable.
How about the 1918 flu, misnamed "Spanish" even though the earliest known cases were in Kansas? That's the closest parallel we have to COVID-19, and it wasn't cause by Traditional Chinese Medicine or bush meat or anything like that.
In any case, the start of the epidemic during WW1 hints that the origin may be linked to it. That bushmeat or wet markets are currently a huge risk does not mean that there are no other types of risky situations.
https://www.kansas.com/news/local/article200880539.html
Note that it's a Kansas source. People there don't deny it.
> In any case, the start of the epidemic during WW1 hints that the origin may be linked to it.
Citation needed. The war certainly contributed to its spread but that's not the same as its origin.
Sorry, but you seem very certain of this claim, and I don't see evidence to back it up. Please point us to evidence that Chinese agricultural practices are directly responsible for pandemic viruses. If anything, the common agricultural practices of over-using antibiotic, which the both the US and China engages in, is what most scientific studies have pointed to sources of public health concerns because they can breed super germs. Point us to evidence of practice unique to Chinese agriculture that's causing pandemics. It is concerning when an audience that's supposed to be fact-based like Hackernews is circulating this type of uninformed "cultural shaming". Please exercise evidence-based reasoning, and exemplify the values of Hacker News community when you feel the urge to cast broad judgment about an entire cultural system.
I'm not here to defend the Chinese agricultural system specifically, but I'm happy to stand up and call out this kind of nonsense whenever and wherever it pops up, may it be directed toward an Asian culture or Western one.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014067360...
"Wet markets—a continuing source of severe acute respiratory syndrome and influenza?"
Not many parts of the world have this practice and the places that do have nasty viruses.
1. This report is also strangely claiming that the H1N1 swine flu most likely "came from a frozen source and a laboratory seems the most probable culprit", a claim that both the WHO and CDC refuted. This raises a red flag for me.
2. I appreciate you sharing the article, and I want to read it critically. Unfortuantely this article does not provide any hard evidence (from tests or physical analysis) showing a clear direct link between SARS and wet-market. It doesn't even have a methodology section, so I'm not sure why it's in a scientific publication. I'm guessing this is a paper that tried to summarize current findings, but the best evidence this paper can give is this: "The host range of SARS coronaviruses in wild or farm-raised animals is not resolved. Yi Guan and colleagues14 recently established a potential zoonotic origin of SARS coronavirus (CoV) and wet markets as a possible source of the original outbreak." In other words, they think it could from wet-markets but they don't even know the transmission vector. Where's the hard science to back up the provocative title that "wet market is a continuing source of severe acute respiratory syndrome and influenza"? I guess putting a question mark in the title lowers the burden of proof for the author.
3. I do take one point from this study seriously: The butchering process of animals should be regulated. When animals are butchered at an industrial scale in factories, health inspectors can easily check the butchering process. But when they are done at very small scale in smaller wet-markets, it is very difficult to inspect them. This is a rightful public health concern, whether or not it is the source of influenza.
4. Actually, the US and Europe still have wet markets, and the public seem to love them. They're called fish markets, where fishermen sell their daily catch directly to consumers. They'll cut and clean the animals right in front of customers. To be clear, they have tighter regulation than the wet markets we see in Latin America, Asia, or Africa, but they are exactly the the same kind of markets: they allow farmers and fishermen to sell directly to consumers in small daily batches, which can include butchering services.
Initially called an "outbreak", widespread H1N1 infection was first recognized in the state of Veracruz, Mexico, with evidence that the virus had been present for months before it was officially called an "epidemic"