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One Thing Is Clear: It’s Time to Shut China’s Wet Markets
The world must demand that China shut down its wildlife farms and wet markets. Now.
With the emergence of SARS in 2003 from a wet market in China, it was recognized that these farms and markets were perfect breeding grounds for coronaviruses and we were warned that future pandemics would come from these sources. I traveled extensively in China post-SARS and, when asking about the farms and markets, was told the government felt it would cause too much social disruption to close them. Seventeen years later, the world is paying the price for that decision. And COVID-19, however bad it turns out to be, is not nearly as horrible as the worst-case coronavirus that could emerge from China.
Regardless of whether you think our current reaction to COVID-19 is overheated, too cool, or just right, we should all be able to agree on the importance of China finally taking responsibility and action.
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Seventeen years ago China was embracing free markets and low regulation. Today there is a very different regime in charge, and it likes telling the citizens what they can and can’t do. If the ChiComs can ban motorcycles, surely they can ban wet markets.
If they can ban babies, they can ban wet markets!
Touché !
Shut them all down or keep the stop on all the flights to China.
It wasn’t recognized by me, because I wasn’t aware of this controversy. Do you have a URL for recommended reading?
Here’s a recent article https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/coronavirus-outbreakchinese-live-animal-markets-recipe-disaster/
There are articles, books, and medical journal articles going back more than a decade discussing the problem. I was well aware of it at the time because of all the discussion around SARS. It was considered a wakeup call to the world about the danger of these farms and markets.
The origin of SARS was traced back to civets which could be found in these markets. Supposedly live civets were banned but a year after SARS I was in Shanghai and met a colleague of mine who told me a few days earlier she’d been in a restaurant in south China that had live civets in cages!
And though China is the main offender, these markets and farms need to be banned everywhere because of the danger they pose.
Thanks for the link. I don’t disbelieve you at all, but I’m also going to look for something that gets at this issue from the angle of evolutionary biology, as it’s something I’d like to understand better. I am aware that it is thought a lot of our other long-time contagious diseases originated with humans living in close proximity with poultry, pigs, etc.
Try this one.
Thanks. I’ve found some articles in Virus Evolution and The Lancet that answer some of my questions.
The only way this happens is if we stop buying things that say ‘Made in China’.
They’ve had previous coronavirus epidemics in China. They’ve already said they’re not going to stop eating the animals where the viruses originated.
All the countries that have close relationships with China are now paying the price — Italy and the rest of the EU, Iran, and the US, especially New York City.
I think that would be perfect as an ongoing policy for people coming from China to put them in quarantine for two weeks when they arrive.
Too bad the airport at Guantanamo Bay isn’t bigger. They could process everyone through there….
Since I’ve complained in the past when titles of my posts have been changed when promoted to Main Feed, I thought I’d say this time I approve of the change!
There is no way to make a libertarian, “keep your hands off me approach to diseases.” If someone is fat or smokes, that’s their business but diseases are an unavoidably collectivist problem. The freedom of wet markets infringes on the freedom of my elderly relatives just as anti-vaxers infringe on the rights of the immuno-suppressed.