This would also tamp down on poaching and general animal abuse. The challenge is unless you reduce the actual demand for TCM you will just shift to black/gray markets which is likely net worse. I don’t know how to reduce that demand except through education and generational change.

It is utterly bizarre to believe that eating different animal flesh will provide some sort of unique medicinal properties. It’s all pretty much muscle or fat tissue which is all very similar between wildly different organisms. Animals aren’t like plants or fungi which make a huge library of secondary metabolite compounds that do work as medicine. Like all archaic belief systems, let us hope that with enough time the light of science shines in.

It may be bizarre. I grew up on traditional Chinese medicine in Taiwan. Vast majority I had was various types of plants like you mentioned in power, pellet, or pill form very similar to western medicine. There is some medicine extracted from animal products like musk, honey, etc, though much less used.

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.

With the amount of people who believes vaccines cause autism, pardon me for being pessimistic..

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 wildlife trade definitely contributes to the increased likelihood that disease jump from animals to humans. However, it seems that most of the risk comes from bushmeat, or meat from wildlife that are not domesticated sources. As far as we know, the SARS outbreak was from bushmeat, for example. But China is not the only country that has a problem with bushmeat. Africa, also has a problem with bushmeat, which has been linked to Ebola outbreak. Bushmeat is a problem, and illegal poaching for "medicine" is a problem; but these are two separate phenomenons. What they have in common is the victim: wildlife.

H1N1 also came from viruses from pigs in North America. So it's not just bushmeat. I think we have our share of work to do here as well.