I agree with the general aims of the article, but I doubt that the demand that the author makes - that China closes its wet markets - will be practically doable.
With a billion people that have no reason to trust their government, it's going to be hard to convince them to drop what they and their families had learned with blood during the Mao-era famines.
It's also so perverse around the world. Until we can provide adequate non wet market food stores and supplies, most notably at affordable pricing for these often highly impoverished areas, there isn't much for change.
Further it brings into question the items that are good or bad. Is "Racoon Dog" ok or not? Can they sell "Bats"?
Then as you mention, people are going to stick to what they do. Good example, how many people are out and about even though the US government said "please stay home".
It's easy to point a finger and say do as I say and not as I do, but until we solve the global issue of food / health, it will be hard to enact any tight control over these types of situations.
Somehow the rest of the world doesn't have this problem. Let's start by not keeping live animals in food markets. Introduce food processing standards. Go from there.
Yes they are impoverished, but this is grinding humanity to a halt. It is probably the most impactful money we can spend.
> Further it brings into question the items that are good or bad. Is "Racoon Dog" ok or not? Can they sell "Bats"?
As far as I understand things (which is only from reading articles and watching YouTube videos of people visiting these markets), most of the animals like bats, civets, pangolins, etc. that are implicated in zoonotic diseases are delicacies rather than staples. If they were banned, nobody would starve.
The research on Chinese coronavirus outbreaks indicates that bats are a large reservoir for these viruses, and they frequently infect other animals, but it is difficult to pinpoint the final jump to humans exactly. Given the unique status of bats in this regard, it's probably best to keep live ones away from humans or other animals intended for human consumption.
China's leadership can relocate half a million people when they want to build a dam. They will be able to crack down on wet markets. The current pandemic should be the last one happening in a non-war setting. I can write this here from home in Europe and it will end up on a disk somewhere in the US within 13ms, we should be able to prevent man-made pandemics.
Considering how much influence their government has on businesses, it should be even easier. I wouldn't be surprised if most wet markets were actually owned by state-owned enterprises.
Authoritarian regimes have less control over their populace than you imagine. The War on Drugs is a laughable failure the whole world over, and China is no exception. If something as unsavory as drugs, which are easily condemned, are able to survive and continue, even under the CCP, how successful will a law against wet markets be, when the populace is in favor of it?
The issue with authoritarianism in this case, is that a fear of looking bad; weak, or ineffectual, caused mid-level party leaders to try and hide the reality of the situation, with disastrous results. (That Trumpism has lead the US in the same, disastrous direction is shameful. I don't know enough about the cause in Italy to comment about the failures there.)
It's funny you should bring up the Five Eyes intelligence alliance (assuming that's what your Europe-US ping time is referring to). We had knowledge of "an unknown virus" as early as November. That no one paid attention to it is a human failing, not a technology issue.
Absolutely. The worst thing is that whenever these pandemics happen China does ban them but they a few months later they allow them to reopen. Do they think that the same thing won't happen again? Vox put out a pretty good video on wet markets recently.
I remember when I was small, I accompanied my mom to a wet market, and saw a frog butchered in front of my eyes (chopped into two horizontal cut), and that gave me chills till this day that I actually don't eat frog meat. I do other stuffs though and have no problem handling knife for meat work.
On the other hand, wet market like Tokyo's Tsukiji is very fresh and clean. Actually, wet markets through Japan are usually really fresh and clean, and have no noticeable smell. I wonder how they do that.
Traditional Chinese culture at it again. Seems like another tool for CCP to control its people, and "culture" is just an excuse. They do the same thing for traditional Chinese martial art vs MMA as well (see the whole Xu Xiaodong fiasco).
the issue isn't seafood (living or dead) its live mammals and birds. Tsujiki doesn't sell any mammals/birds and the vast majority of what is sold there is long dead, so its fine. The issue is when you have lots of bats/pigs/birds/etc in close proximity.
I don't know about Japan specifically but in the Caribbeans we'd often ship shrimps and other seafood in carbonic ice ("dry ice" in layman terms, turns solid below −56.4 °C (−69.5 °F). It has the added benefit of leaving no residue. I noticed as a child that there's little to no smell when using this.
Afaik (1990s), it's just more expensive (and possible frostbites without gloves iirc), so we don't use it when normal ice works, but I can see Japan using that for all wet markets (because sushi of all things).
Can't remember which reality show was it. But the concept was for a bunch of city people living in a small mountainous village without outside help. As I flipped though channels, there was an episode that caught my attention.
On this episode, these city people were craving for pork. I believe they were seeded a pig ready to be butchered. Now their community rule was "If you help out in butchering the pig, you get to have a share." Essentially in this show, you need to kill every single animal yourselves if you want to eat it. Those city people were not good at butchering either. I recall the scene was pretty ugly. Quickly some people decided they don't want pork anymore after some dry heaving. For those who went through with butchering, they get to make pork chops and cure their own bacon just to add some delight to their arduous rural lives.
It's important not to demonize Chinese people here. However, it's at the very least equally important to ensure that their agricultural practices stop producing these pandemic viruses. This is not the first one. Not even close. This is not one of those things that could have happened anywhere and the Chinese were simply unlucky. This is a direct consequence of their agricultural practices and it is extremely important that those change. Some level of international shame may be appropriate here to ensure that that happens, and as always it's important that that not steer into racism. However, 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.
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"
I don't think we're actually sure where swine flu originated. It was first identified in America, but that might just be because their flu surveillance is better than other countries.
> This is a direct consequence of their agricultural practices
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.
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.
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.
I agree, demonizing the Chinese people is the worst thing anyone can do. They didn't want this virus either, but they taught us how we can contain it, and they paid the price with countless human lives.
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.
They did, but they also wasted a lot of time in January, allowing the virus to travel the world. But as you mentioned, other nations made similar mistakes, and they had the benefit of being warned.
However, when it comes to the question of responsibility for preventing a third SARS outbreak originating from China, the answer lies with the CCP.
I'm sorry, what? They only started to do the right thing once they realized a cover-up wouldn't be successful [1]. Even then, we're still hearing about attempts to silence scientists and destroy evidence.
I am not sure how this is comparable. There is a concept called degree of risk. Bats are known for being reservoir of zootonic viruses unlike common farm animals like chickens, cows etc. Moreover, eating bats is easier to give up provided that we already have lots of other safer alternatives of meats.
Let me think about it... Some people in the food industry fed dead sheep to cows and thus created a whole new form of transmissible, deadly desease. Hmmm... Yes I think that falls into the same category.
Comparatively small. Estimates are that cost about $5.7b USD over the course of 5 years[0]. Conservative estimates are that it's going to cost $2.7t USD, and that was from before it was labeled a pandemic. [1]
Not to mention that all the leafy green recalls, such as E. Coli in the lettuce this January [1] and salmonella in the spinach last September [2]. This happens every few months, and has for as long as I can remember.
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.
China is not only place where these viruses appear. The swine flu appeared in North America, some kinds of flu appeared in other places like the Middle East. The only thing special about China is that it has a lot of people, so there is a higher probability of human-virus contact.
It's true that these viruses have arisen in other places. But it is not true that there is nothing special about China. Chinese wet markets are uniquely susceptible to the generation of these sorts of pathogens, for reasons that are explained all over in the comments of this thread, and in the original article.
The swine flu was manageable, because it's a type of flu.
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.
> The swine flu was manageable, because it's a type of flu.
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.
You say Kansas, some people have pointed at China. I read a book a long time ago that said France, more specifically a US or UK military camp where pigs, horses, chickens and wounded men were in close quarters.
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.
Of course someone said it was China. It's only slightly more surprising that they'd say France, but some people will jump at any chance to place the blame "over there" and it has nothing to do with the science. The earliest documented cases were in Haskell county, from which it spread to Fort Riley, and from there to the WW1 front, etc.
You're asking for citations when it's perfectly clear from the discussion we're having that there is no scientific consensus. I can only assume you're asking in bad faith.
Traditional Medicine is a disgrace. As is any other kind of “alternative” medicine regardless of which culture it springs from. It’s either medicine or it’s not medicine; there is no third category.
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.
I don't think we should go out of our way to be racist. But I'm struggling to be outraged by a spade being called a spade. Apparently the origin of CV-19 wasn't random. Maybe China deserves however amount of international shaming is required to evoke reform.
Or better than shaming is actual penalties. Maybe we ban wet markets and blacklist nations who allow them.
I'm not here to defend selling bushmeat or the trade of wildlife for "medicine", but wet markets are simply markets where farmers can set up stalls and sell directly to consumers, including livestock and meat. Yes, it doesn't have the same sanitation code as supermarkets, but these wet markets are actually just what regular markets looked like 100 years ago. There's nothing nefarious going on there that breeds pandemic, except for the ones where they trade bushmeat, but these are exceptions; and the problem is the bushmeat, not the wet market.
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.
I think I hear what you're saying. It's about perspective. But I also think you made my point when you said "what regular markets looked like 100 years ago." That's exactly the problem. So yeah, they're not some evil contraption you'd see in a James Bond chase scene. But they're stuck in the past and our health standards have gone way up since then.
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.
1. No one is saying "let the people die". Health and safety standards should be raised as we gain more understanding of health risks. My point is that we need to increase the safety standards and health codes at wet markets, beginning first by banning the wildlife trade and bushmeat.
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.
No culture has a monopoly on this type of behavior. For instance, it's widely believed that HIV was introduced to the human population by African populations eating monkeys and apes. It's well past time that we recognize that eating unsanitary, exotic meats is a threat to the entire human population. For as bad as the ensuing epidemics have become, the relative difficulty of transmitting HIV and the relative survivability of SARS-CoV-2 are enormous strokes of luck; we won't always be this lucky.
It's important not to confuse a people with their government, especially when said government is totalitarian and eminently corrupt.
> 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.
> This is a direct consequence of their agricultural practices
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.
I suspect it wont be long before someone calls your post whataboutism. I relatively recently discovered HN and originally had high hopes bot those quickly evaporated. It looks to me that "exercise evidence-based reasoning" and HN are 2 things that do not have much in common. And the system of downvotiong does not make it any better.
There have been a lot of papers and investigations that suggested a link to wet markets for this and prior pandemics of respiratory diseases. Here's a paper from 2004:
Thanks for sharing that particular report. There's a couple of things worth pointing out.
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.
Terminology alert: this has nothing to do with agricultural practices, since agriculture is the farming of plants. Pastoral practices are barely relevant either, since the disease is thought to have arisen from the practice of consuming wild animals.
Wet markets? Do you want to be able to go to a market and buy fresh fish? Do you think that's an option that should be available to you or to your favourite restaurant owner? Because if so, then well done, you're one of the people that think these markets are ok.
Or just stop eating meat altogether. There are diseases and potent antibiotic resistant bugs brewing in our factory farms in the west too. None of this is necessary for human health or nutrition.
>“The wet market in Lagos is notorious. It’s like a nuclear bomb waiting to happen. But it’s not fair to demonise places which do not have fridges. These traditional markets provide much of the food for Africa and Asia,”
I think it’s a disgrace that the Chinese government hasn’t apologized for
1.) keeping wet market open
2.) silencing whistleblower doctor that would have stopped a pandemic
3.) letting 5 million people leave Wuhan
4.) pressuring WHO to not recommend border shutdown against China - Conjecture
5.) silencing whistleblowers inside China and around the world
6.) at one point, was surfacing propagandas that the virus didn’t even originate in China (from japan or Italy). Also tried to float the idea that US planted the virus in Wuhan.
> China Spins Tale That the U.S. Army Started the Coronavirus Epidemic: After criticizing American officials for politicizing the pandemic, Chinese officials and news outlets have floated unfounded theories that the United States was the source of the virus.
My uneducated guess is that it's the western internet getting into a fit over what was essentially a Twitter fight between officials.
Related to that and some other stories about evil China - if China treated certain politician's Twitter feeds or Fox News articles as seriously as the West seems to treat China's equivalents, North America would probably be glassed by now.
One under director of the Foreign Affairs office posted it on Twitter, a site blocked in China. By this logic, the US is also telling their own people that the virus is a biological weapon because one senator said it on Fox News.
"Mr. Zhao’s remarks were spread on China’s most prominent social media platform, Weibo, under a hashtag: #ZhaoLijianPostedFiveTweetsinaRowQuestioningAmerica. By late afternoon on Friday, that hashtag had been viewed more than 160 million times, along with screenshots of the original Twitter posts."
They have a million muslims imprisoned and are stealing their homes and letting soldiers rape their wives. You think they should apologize for wet markets first? Every country in south east asia has wet markets. China is wiping out minorities they don't like. Maybe the outrage should be focused somewhere else.
Sorry to be the bearer of an unpleasant reality, but the latter racist phrasing is far more recent than the attempts by the CCP to spread propaganda about this virus being a US army bio-weapon (which started weeks ago) and calling it the 'Wuhan virus' may be provocative but is not inaccurate.
I'm a lefty, so I think it's important to consider that viruses or diseases are often named for the first person to have them, discover them or the region in which they originated.
- Hodgkins Lymphoma is named after... Thomas Hodgkin who discovered it.
The recent bout of sensitivity is likely a game of left v. right finger-pointing. Who cares whether it's the Wuhan virus, the Wengliang Flu (after the man who discovered it) or nCoV-19? Go find a cure, a vaccine, etc. Naming a disease after where it started is a long-standing tradition. [1] This kind of shit-stirring over something nobody is actually offended by is exactly what gets the right worked up.
[EDIT] In fact, having a disease named after you is considered honorific: "Eponyms are a longstanding tradition in Western science and medicine. Being awarded an eponym is regarded as an honor: 'Eponymity, not anonymity, is the standard.' The scientific and medical communities regard it as bad form to attempt to eponymise oneself." [1]
"Wuhan virus", "Chinese virus" are not racist terms. "Kung Flu" is people making funny a serious thing because "Kung Fu" "Kung Flu". I would not level any of that up to racism.
It was happening long before the WH uttered a word, so if you really want to blame Trump for Chinese propaganda - you are going to have to argue for the concept of preemptive retaliation.
While also providing proof that those statements predate China's antics. When China was accusing everyone of fear-mongering, and hints of travel restrictions were met with speeches about the holocaust and hypocritical appeals to the WHO, which US official is to blame for that? I've been watching this thing since December, the USG is pretty much the last one to the party - China's state run media has been saying crazy stuff since day one.
Though it does not excuse many of China's initial actions, and I doubt this is the only reason for those actions, I can understand wanting to downplay something like this while you're in the middle of negotiations to stop a trade war. It's not hard to imagine the US calling for an immediate closing of the borders and shelving of the trade deal.
> Though it does not excuse many of China's initial actions...
This qualifier, "initial", makes me think you are arguing that their subsequent actions are excusable. I'd argue they aren't excusable, even from a completely amoral utilitarian perspective - because nothing they've done even looks rational. Accusing the other party in trade negotiations of releasing a biological weapon, coincidentally right next to your own infectious disease facility, isn't going to improve negotiation prospects - no rational person would think that it could. Threatening to interrupt medical supply chains during a pandemic... I can't think of a better battlecry for those who'd advocate pulling all operations out of China. Forcing workers to return to the factories and claiming that you are back at 85% capacity, when everyone has access to near real time satellite imagery proving that your coal plants aren't running, isn't going to strengthen your negotiation position.
>This qualifier, "initial", makes me think you are arguing that their subsequent actions are excusable.
Over the past months they have made many good moves, and their conduct after signing the trade deal in early January seems decent.
>Accusing the other party in trade negotiations of releasing a biological weapon, coincidentally right next to your own infectious disease facility
One member of the foreign department posting things on Twitter is not the actions of the state. Further, that man's post seemed to be made as a reply to the "US accusation" that the virus was unleashed intentionally by the Chinese. I don't understand how you can attack one while repeating the other.
And while I don't support forcing workers back to work or misleading economic reports, they're fairly common tactics worldwide.
> ...reply to the "US accusation" that the virus was unleashed intentionally by the Chinese.
Oh that is an easy one. That US accusation was actually open speculation by Indian and German researchers examining the only data that China was willing to share with the rest of the world. They weren't accused of intentionally unleashing it, but negligence was speculated - the lying and secrecy is the cause for that, and they have only themselves to blame. China had allowed only one outside crisis team in, from the WHO (which lost credibility long ago) - and they only spent a single day in Wuhan. Around that time it was discovered that China had been under-reporting infections by an order of magnitude, every province coincidentally made the same calculation error for the same period of time.
> ...they're fairly common tactics worldwide.
This is all unprecedented. We have never seen such transparent lies counter-messaged in near realtime by way of opensource intelligence. Grassroots btw, the corporate response has been denial - followed by a week or two of softening messaging, then admission to the truth. The information surrounding cross species transmissibility is a good example: videos starting popping up of Chinese people hurling their pets from rooftops in response to government warnings with regard to transmissibility. The corporate media immediately swung into action, declaring any such talk as racist FakeNews™ - but they were wrong again.
This seems to be referring to the immediately pulled journal saying some parts of the virus were very similar to HIV, at least that's the only Indian or German researcher based thing I've heard. That wasn't the start of the hoax, the "open speculation" was basically just that engineering this was possible, and the blame for these hoaxes does not rest on the Chinese.
>This is all unprecedented.
It's not, and I was referencing two very specific claims you were making. When you feel we are encountering an unprecedented level of misinformation, why do you think that your information is untainted?
The only perpetrator that would provide an excuse for baselessly accusing the US military would have to be the US government. So when did they fabricate that hoax? Was it when the FBI started cracking down on spies in January? Are they the ones that pressured the Mounties to start clearing their level-4 labs of Chinese virologists last year?
> ...the blame for these hoaxes does not rest on the Chinese.
The lying and secrecy creates the environment in which that sort of thing thrives. At some point you can't characterize predictable consequences as victim blaming, for many the benefit of doubt was lost pretty early on, following the crackdown on doctors and journalists who accurately described events.
> When you feel we are encountering an unprecedented level of misinformation, why do you think that your information is untainted?
Let me be more clear: China lying about something is to be expected. What is unprecedented is the combination of two things: the lie being told has severe and unavoidable consequences to everyone, and the means to combat the lies are not only open to all - but are actively being employed to do so. The beauty of opensource intelligence is that any potential for manipulation can be quantified in a way that secretly sourced data cannot.
> (6) is a direct response to the White House's continued use of 'Wuhan virus'
How is that a direct response by blaming it on a third country?? And aside from racism, the virus originated in Wuhan China and that is due to unsanitary wet markets, China should own it at least, not asking financial damages for the world economy and lives lost. Fuck Trump, this has nothing to do with his rhetoric, these are facts. The chinese government supressed info about this virus.
However, the US government is responsable for doing nothing for more than a month!!!
> ... the virus originated in Wuhan China and that is due to unsanitary wet markets.
There are innumerable wet markets in Asia, this is not only totally unwarranted but largely xenophobic. Would you call the leafy green supply chain in the US "unsanitary" since we recall them in the US a few times a year? The last time we recalled spinach over salmonella was just 6 months ago [1] E. Coli was just 3 months ago [2].
To quote the WHO: "Primary sources of [E. Coli] outbreaks are raw or undercooked ground meat products, raw milk, and faecal contamination of vegetables" [3] so someone's been pooping in America's mixed greens.
They may be a bit gruesome if you're unaccustomed but they serve so many people it's hard to believe they're overwhelmingly unsanitary.
> The chinese government supressed info about this virus.
No, (6) is a direct attempt to distract from the Chinese government's own screw-ups and defuse the outrage it caused within their own population. It was originally aimed at their domestic audience and appeared in the Chinese-language state press and social media before they started spreading the same conspiracy theory in the West.
It's more likely that the CCP is responding to a more general allegation of Coronavirus-related racism against Chinese people (e.g. stereotypes about Chinese people as a race and/or culture being universally unsanitary) than specifically to the use of "Wuhan virus" (which is accurate) or "Kung Flu" (which is little more than a silly pun, though I'm partial to "Fluhan" myself).
No the UN should get serious and start pointing out the human rights violations for which they are guilty. The Chinese people deserve better than this.
China's Supreme Court did somewhat apologize-without-actually-saying-sorry re: point #2 (by admitting that authorities should've taken Dr. Li's "rumors" about it looking like SARS seriously instead of trying to shut him up). This would also apply to point #5 (which seems to be a duplicate of #2, really).
So, what’s the difference between a “wet market” and the sort of familiar farmer’s market of butchers/fishmongers/etc. that five-star restaurants source from all over the world?
This article seems to be doing a motte-and-bailey of grossing you out with things that are just “regular meat wholesaler things” (e.g. fresh meat sitting out on ice without refrigeration) and then moralizing about the specific kinds of meats available in certain markets in China.
As far as I can tell, the author really just wants to tell Chinese people to stop eating certain meats (pragmatically, bush meats; but also, less pragmatically, whatever a Westerner would find gauche, like endangered species or things we’d consider pets), but doesn’t want to come out and say what they really mean; and so instead tries to seem like they’re making a point about sanitation. In so doing, they end up arguing against the existence of wholesale meat markets in general, which is clearly silly: meat wholesaling happens all over the world every day and is perfectly sanitary, despite seeming to a layman like it’d be unsanitary. (It is unsanitary in some ways, but in general principle—which can certainly be violated, like any other standard can—it’s always exactly as sanitary as it needs to be for any given use-case. Meats that are cooked get treated with less care; meats that are served raw are treated with more.)
This sort of reminds me of the parable of the new owner who came into a bakery and demanded it be cleaned because everything was greasy. The bakers kindly informed them that the grease was intentionally put on every surface, right after cleaning; and that, in fact, grease is used to clean some surfaces. Some systems function perfectly well in ways that seem disturbing to outsiders. If the bakers have been greasing the bakery for thousands of years, and you’ve never gotten sick from a loaf of bread, then maybe think a moment before telling the bakers to stop greasing the bakery.
Certainly, if you buy a loaf of bread and it turns out to have a bunch of thumbtacks in it, there’s a problem. But not one, I would suspect, endemic to the concept of bakeries.
> So, what’s the difference between a “wet market” and the sort of familiar farmer’s market
1) The wet market is full of live animals in close proximity and very unsanitary conditions. So pathogens are more likely to still be alive, and can jump between diverse hosts, not just to humans.
2) The wet market is full of non-domesticated, exotic animals which carry pathogens humans are not acquainted to.
Re 1: you’re probably picturing your local butcher shop. Don’t. Picture a pier in a coastal town. The lobsters? Alive. The oysters? Alive. In close proximity? Certainly. Sitting right beside a bunch of gutted fish and processed chum? Yup. That’s a wet market. You can’t name one thing going on in Wuhan that doesn’t happen on such a pier. Even the general approach of “whatever we catch, we sell” is the same.
And yet, nobody gets sick from that. Food poisoning in your sushi or your raw oysters, every time it’s been followed up, has turned out to be from the source (farming in bad conditions) or from transport (shipping hundreds of miles in non-refrigerated trucks), not from cross-contamination at a market.
Thus my point: clearly, some markets keep generating diseases; but if they’re doing the same thing as the markets that don’t generate diseases, then it’s likely not wet markets as a process for distributing food that are the problem here. Because some of them—almost all of them, in fact—work just fine. (Analogy: are “restaurants” a vector for disease? Not in general, no. Specific ones, certainly. But not as a concept. Something additional has to be going on.)
So, if you eliminate the process itself, what’s left? The inventory and its sourcing; the people and their own personal hygiene; and a few other things. In any case much less tasteful topics to argue about. Which is why people would prefer that this not be about those things, and instead be some endemic issue to meat markets.
The risk to human health from gutted mammals is much higher than from lobsters, because viruses are more often compatible between more closely related species.
A reasonable restriction would be on wet markets for mammals, excepting a few where the safety properties are well known like cows.
You're off by two orders of magnitude of number of different and wild species. That's THE key. The variation and combinations of vicera and species.
"...live wolf pups, golden cicadas, scorpions, bamboo rats, squirrels, foxes, civets, hedgehogs (probably porcupines), salamanders, turtles and crocodiles. In addition, it offered assorted parts of some animals, such as crocodile tail, belly, tongue and intestines...."
People do, sometimes, get sick from shellfish. Some ancient cultures reacted to this by creating a food taboo against shellfish (I believe Jews and Muslims do this). Other cultures have implemented monitoring for "red tide" conditions and restrict shellfish harvesting accordingly.
As human beings, when we make a mistake that leads to diseases that kill people, we do what we can to avoid making that same mistake twice. I'm not sure why this is an objectionable or questionable notion.
It's not the same. Live ocean creatures are isolated from each other. They're stored in water-tight containers by necessity. By contrast, live land animals are stored in cages and often stacked on top of each other.
Vox has a video explaining "Why new diseases keep appearing in China" [1]. They include footage of Chinese wet markets around the 2:00 mark. I think they make an excellent case for strictly regulating, or even outright banning wet markets.
Long ago, Europe had the same problem. The cities were full of wet markets, and were basically the perfect conditions for creating new plagues. There's a nice CGP Grey video on this, "Americapox: The Missing Plague" [2].
Wet markets should be banned because they contain endangered species and the vendors are committing horrible animal rights abuses, oh and they are responsible for multiple corona viruses too.
> So, what’s the difference between a “wet market” and the sort of familiar farmer’s market of butchers/fishmongers/etc. that five-star restaurants source from all over the world?
That's exactly the question I have. How are these Chinese markets fundamentally different from, say, the Japanese Tsukiji fish market? Taking a look at pictures like https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vendors_begin_sell... it doesn't strike me as very much different from the Chinese wet markets.
The relevant differences, to my view, are the ones that allowed a pandemic coronavirus to jump from the Chinese bat population to the global human population over the course of just a few months. The specific details are a question for experts in the field, but something clearly went wrong here and it's important for the sake of the entire world to make sure it doesn't go wrong again.
H5N1, SARS and COVID-19 have been traced back to asian wet markets.
Seeing the effects COVID-19 has I really don't care what cultural or emotional reason you could have for those markets.
Just BAN everything that could ever allow this. The thought that we knew it could happen AND that it already happened blows my mind.
The phrase I really liked for these sort of articles are 'Intellectual zambonis". Here come the right wing intellectuals to buff over the rampant xenophobia and put a sheen of intellectual justification behind it.
Let us be clear about this: A 'wet market' is
> a market selling fresh meat, fish, produce, and other perishable goods as distinguished from "dry markets" which sell durable goods such as fabric and electronics
Fish & Meat counters exist at literally every large supermarket in the UK, is she planning on banning Billingsgate Market? Or, have we just come up with a term 'wet market' - that no one actually has heard before, dressed it up as some asian odity and then decided we need to ban it?
Wet markets aren't a particularly likely place for pandemics to spawn from (let's ignore the fact that there a literally hundreds of thousands of them operating every day). We're not fighting off dozens of epidemics. The thing that enables these outbreaks is bad food hygeine standards, and that doens't improve by banning anything we've decided is vaguely foreign and scary.
Keeping live animals for long periods of times in close proximity to food is a recipe for pandemics. This is the 4th caused under such circumstances in recent memory.
Closing the markets is the most straightforward solution. We must be decisive about this, it's the only reasonable option.
They don't keep live fruit bats in African markets. Ebola happened nonetheless.
In fact, keeping live animals is a very sensible thing to do when there is no cold chain. It is the traditional way to insure that the meat you buy is safe(ish).
Doesn't look like at this point we should be caring too much about not offending. You know, after thousands have died because some undomesticated people eat bats and stuff.
Most people, chinese or not have nothing to do with the cause of this outbreak. Let’s be real. It killed thousands of innocent people so far, including Chinese.
> Under starvation conditions, does it really matter what vessel of bodily flesh was delivering your next caloric intake? Why would you squander any body part?
Why would you ever waste part of something you killed for sustenance? Waste is waste.
> There’s an old Cantonese saying that goes, ‘anything that walks, swims, crawls, or flies with its back to heaven is edible’.
I mean, it is, and frequently, it's delicious. Meat is meat, ya know, I care more about how the animal lived up until it ended up on my plate, not what animal specifically (so long as it's not endangered).
> The myth that freshly killed animals taste superior is very pervasive, particularly among the older generation. ‘Freshly killed hens are much better than frozen meat in supermarkets, if you want to make perfect chicken soup,’ a 60-year-old woman named Ran told Bloomberg while shopping at a Chinese wet market. ‘The flavor is richer.’
Wild bats can live atop a market or somewhere else with feces picked up by animals living below. Also patient zero is thought to be not associated with the Huanan Market, although the first discovered major cluster did happen there.
I'm terrified that this outbreak is giving us a taste of the ecofascism that we're in for with the climate crisis, because now authors like this one can just outright say the quiet part loud.
Which particular bit is fascist? I agree that ecofascism could very well be on the horizon, but reading this article I missed any quiet racism/fascism said loudly.
> Chinese folks with rural roots still associate freshness with how recently the meat was slaughtered. This is why sellers keep their animals alive and only butcher them before their customers’ eyes.
Anecdotally: I ate the best tasting salmon I've had for a long while. It was frozen salmon from ALDI.
That is a lie and you really should stop trying to repeat it. There is no evidence at all that this virus originated in the US and a metric shit-ton of evidence that it comes from Wuhan. Given your comment history as an apologist for the CCP I am not surprised by the lie, but I still feel compelled to call it out.
We should ban both factory farming and wet markets. If people want to ban the latter and not the former, they’re either ignorant of the massive problems with factory farming or have a super dubious double standard.
This author is making a bunch of tenuous equivalencies. A wet market does not have to have exotic animals, live birds or live mammals, undomesticated animals, or be dirty.
There are markets that get emptied out and thoroughly cleaned every night, and sellers bring fresh fish and domesticated slaughter every morning.
A call for the wholesale ban of wet markets without acknowledging that plenty of safe wet markets exist is hard to take seriously.
They were banned after SARS and that worked, no new diseases from China for a few years. Then they were permitted again and we got MERS and now COVID-19.
China needs to learn its lesson for good this time...
Just point out MERS originated in the middle east. And then there is also Australia’s 1994 Hendra virus outbreak where corona viruses made the jump from flying foxes to horses. People working with the infected horses fell ill and two died.
I am aware, though I thought MERS originated in a (non Chinese) wet market (turns out no one knows) .
You can't stop it happening naturally. That's just life. You can stop shitty wet markets and poor hygiene/food safety causing it to happen regularly. And you can stop letting it spread because you the CCP can't handle bad news.
I don't care which animals people eat or what country their in. But if the way they behave causes these viruses, they need to change. If they won't, we need to stop trading with them and prevent all travel between us. That's not punishment, it's public safety.
Sorry, I assumed you were defending them. It's definately true that virus (and other pathogens) jump species in nature. We just need to stop accelerating the process...
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 176 ms ] threadWith a billion people that have no reason to trust their government, it's going to be hard to convince them to drop what they and their families had learned with blood during the Mao-era famines.
Further it brings into question the items that are good or bad. Is "Racoon Dog" ok or not? Can they sell "Bats"?
Then as you mention, people are going to stick to what they do. Good example, how many people are out and about even though the US government said "please stay home".
It's easy to point a finger and say do as I say and not as I do, but until we solve the global issue of food / health, it will be hard to enact any tight control over these types of situations.
Yes they are impoverished, but this is grinding humanity to a halt. It is probably the most impactful money we can spend.
As far as I understand things (which is only from reading articles and watching YouTube videos of people visiting these markets), most of the animals like bats, civets, pangolins, etc. that are implicated in zoonotic diseases are delicacies rather than staples. If they were banned, nobody would starve.
People across the world eat local food as delicacies or sometimes as staple foods. What is so different about Chinese wildlife?
What matters and should be fixed is sanitary standards, not what kind of meat the Chinese eat.
https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/where-coronavirus... https://www.the-scientist.com/notebook/why-bats-make-such-go... http://nature.com/articles/doi:10.1038/nature22975
The research on Chinese coronavirus outbreaks indicates that bats are a large reservoir for these viruses, and they frequently infect other animals, but it is difficult to pinpoint the final jump to humans exactly. Given the unique status of bats in this regard, it's probably best to keep live ones away from humans or other animals intended for human consumption.
The issue with authoritarianism in this case, is that a fear of looking bad; weak, or ineffectual, caused mid-level party leaders to try and hide the reality of the situation, with disastrous results. (That Trumpism has lead the US in the same, disastrous direction is shameful. I don't know enough about the cause in Italy to comment about the failures there.)
It's funny you should bring up the Five Eyes intelligence alliance (assuming that's what your Europe-US ping time is referring to). We had knowledge of "an unknown virus" as early as November. That no one paid attention to it is a human failing, not a technology issue.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPpoJGYlW54
On the other hand, wet market like Tokyo's Tsukiji is very fresh and clean. Actually, wet markets through Japan are usually really fresh and clean, and have no noticeable smell. I wonder how they do that.
Traditional Chinese culture at it again. Seems like another tool for CCP to control its people, and "culture" is just an excuse. They do the same thing for traditional Chinese martial art vs MMA as well (see the whole Xu Xiaodong fiasco).
Afaik (1990s), it's just more expensive (and possible frostbites without gloves iirc), so we don't use it when normal ice works, but I can see Japan using that for all wet markets (because sushi of all things).
On this episode, these city people were craving for pork. I believe they were seeded a pig ready to be butchered. Now their community rule was "If you help out in butchering the pig, you get to have a share." Essentially in this show, you need to kill every single animal yourselves if you want to eat it. Those city people were not good at butchering either. I recall the scene was pretty ugly. Quickly some people decided they don't want pork anymore after some dry heaving. For those who went through with butchering, they get to make pork chops and cure their own bacon just to add some delight to their arduous rural lives.
I often wonder what I would do in that situation.
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"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_flu_pandemic#History
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.
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.
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.
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.
However, when it comes to the question of responsibility for preventing a third SARS outbreak originating from China, the answer lies with the CCP.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-it-all-started-chinas-early...
If that's anything to go by, we're fucked when it comes to climate change.
[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.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-45906585
[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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Edit: Here's Gordon Ramsey giving you a guide on how to buy good fish (spoiler: he's at a wet market) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GTTXJKZ08Q
those fish are DEAD.
one staple of a wet market is LIVE ANIMALS.
but if you want to accuse me of that, you do you.
since we're on the topic, a sea food restaurant proably wouldn't classify as a wet market, since the only live animals there are fish.
What we're seeing is racism against a different culture.
American Swing Flu killed tens of thousands of people due to poor agricultural practices.
If anything, we should talk about banning the farming of animals altogether.
Comments like these are cratering any value the HN forums used to have. Please stop for the good of the community.
This is not anecdata either, there are well done studies supporting this.
>“The wet market in Lagos is notorious. It’s like a nuclear bomb waiting to happen. But it’s not fair to demonise places which do not have fridges. These traditional markets provide much of the food for Africa and Asia,”
1.) keeping wet market open
2.) silencing whistleblower doctor that would have stopped a pandemic
3.) letting 5 million people leave Wuhan
4.) pressuring WHO to not recommend border shutdown against China - Conjecture
5.) silencing whistleblowers inside China and around the world
6.) at one point, was surfacing propagandas that the virus didn’t even originate in China (from japan or Italy). Also tried to float the idea that US planted the virus in Wuhan.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-13/chinese-o...
That's the headline of this story from March 13: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/13/world/asia/coronavirus-ch...
Related to that and some other stories about evil China - if China treated certain politician's Twitter feeds or Fox News articles as seriously as the West seems to treat China's equivalents, North America would probably be glassed by now.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/13/world/asia/coronavirus-ch...
I'm not defending it, but it isn't happening in a vacuum.
- Hodgkins Lymphoma is named after... Thomas Hodgkin who discovered it.
- Ebola is named after the Ebola River in the DRC. (https://goo.gl/maps/dF1MMnpBBwXpAZ3k8)
- Lyme disease is named after Old Lyme, Connecticut. (https://goo.gl/maps/Haqg2fxmYwcHELRY8)
- Bornholm disease is named after Bornholm Island in Denmark (https://goo.gl/maps/LDWDw5iS9X2xsA3B8), which is caused by the Coxsackie B virus named after... Coxsackie, New York, a small town on the Hudson where it was isolated. (https://goo.gl/maps/RKrhBup2ZAgzXVGJ9)
The recent bout of sensitivity is likely a game of left v. right finger-pointing. Who cares whether it's the Wuhan virus, the Wengliang Flu (after the man who discovered it) or nCoV-19? Go find a cure, a vaccine, etc. Naming a disease after where it started is a long-standing tradition. [1] This kind of shit-stirring over something nobody is actually offended by is exactly what gets the right worked up.
[EDIT] In fact, having a disease named after you is considered honorific: "Eponyms are a longstanding tradition in Western science and medicine. Being awarded an eponym is regarded as an honor: 'Eponymity, not anonymity, is the standard.' The scientific and medical communities regard it as bad form to attempt to eponymise oneself." [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_eponymously_named_dise...
[1] https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/30440/12-diseases-and-lu...
Though it does not excuse many of China's initial actions, and I doubt this is the only reason for those actions, I can understand wanting to downplay something like this while you're in the middle of negotiations to stop a trade war. It's not hard to imagine the US calling for an immediate closing of the borders and shelving of the trade deal.
This qualifier, "initial", makes me think you are arguing that their subsequent actions are excusable. I'd argue they aren't excusable, even from a completely amoral utilitarian perspective - because nothing they've done even looks rational. Accusing the other party in trade negotiations of releasing a biological weapon, coincidentally right next to your own infectious disease facility, isn't going to improve negotiation prospects - no rational person would think that it could. Threatening to interrupt medical supply chains during a pandemic... I can't think of a better battlecry for those who'd advocate pulling all operations out of China. Forcing workers to return to the factories and claiming that you are back at 85% capacity, when everyone has access to near real time satellite imagery proving that your coal plants aren't running, isn't going to strengthen your negotiation position.
Over the past months they have made many good moves, and their conduct after signing the trade deal in early January seems decent.
>Accusing the other party in trade negotiations of releasing a biological weapon, coincidentally right next to your own infectious disease facility
One member of the foreign department posting things on Twitter is not the actions of the state. Further, that man's post seemed to be made as a reply to the "US accusation" that the virus was unleashed intentionally by the Chinese. I don't understand how you can attack one while repeating the other.
And while I don't support forcing workers back to work or misleading economic reports, they're fairly common tactics worldwide.
Oh that is an easy one. That US accusation was actually open speculation by Indian and German researchers examining the only data that China was willing to share with the rest of the world. They weren't accused of intentionally unleashing it, but negligence was speculated - the lying and secrecy is the cause for that, and they have only themselves to blame. China had allowed only one outside crisis team in, from the WHO (which lost credibility long ago) - and they only spent a single day in Wuhan. Around that time it was discovered that China had been under-reporting infections by an order of magnitude, every province coincidentally made the same calculation error for the same period of time.
> ...they're fairly common tactics worldwide.
This is all unprecedented. We have never seen such transparent lies counter-messaged in near realtime by way of opensource intelligence. Grassroots btw, the corporate response has been denial - followed by a week or two of softening messaging, then admission to the truth. The information surrounding cross species transmissibility is a good example: videos starting popping up of Chinese people hurling their pets from rooftops in response to government warnings with regard to transmissibility. The corporate media immediately swung into action, declaring any such talk as racist FakeNews™ - but they were wrong again.
This seems to be referring to the immediately pulled journal saying some parts of the virus were very similar to HIV, at least that's the only Indian or German researcher based thing I've heard. That wasn't the start of the hoax, the "open speculation" was basically just that engineering this was possible, and the blame for these hoaxes does not rest on the Chinese.
>This is all unprecedented.
It's not, and I was referencing two very specific claims you were making. When you feel we are encountering an unprecedented level of misinformation, why do you think that your information is untainted?
The only perpetrator that would provide an excuse for baselessly accusing the US military would have to be the US government. So when did they fabricate that hoax? Was it when the FBI started cracking down on spies in January? Are they the ones that pressured the Mounties to start clearing their level-4 labs of Chinese virologists last year?
> ...the blame for these hoaxes does not rest on the Chinese.
The lying and secrecy creates the environment in which that sort of thing thrives. At some point you can't characterize predictable consequences as victim blaming, for many the benefit of doubt was lost pretty early on, following the crackdown on doctors and journalists who accurately described events.
> When you feel we are encountering an unprecedented level of misinformation, why do you think that your information is untainted?
Let me be more clear: China lying about something is to be expected. What is unprecedented is the combination of two things: the lie being told has severe and unavoidable consequences to everyone, and the means to combat the lies are not only open to all - but are actively being employed to do so. The beauty of opensource intelligence is that any potential for manipulation can be quantified in a way that secretly sourced data cannot.
How is that a direct response by blaming it on a third country?? And aside from racism, the virus originated in Wuhan China and that is due to unsanitary wet markets, China should own it at least, not asking financial damages for the world economy and lives lost. Fuck Trump, this has nothing to do with his rhetoric, these are facts. The chinese government supressed info about this virus.
However, the US government is responsable for doing nothing for more than a month!!!
There are innumerable wet markets in Asia, this is not only totally unwarranted but largely xenophobic. Would you call the leafy green supply chain in the US "unsanitary" since we recall them in the US a few times a year? The last time we recalled spinach over salmonella was just 6 months ago [1] E. Coli was just 3 months ago [2].
To quote the WHO: "Primary sources of [E. Coli] outbreaks are raw or undercooked ground meat products, raw milk, and faecal contamination of vegetables" [3] so someone's been pooping in America's mixed greens.
They may be a bit gruesome if you're unaccustomed but they serve so many people it's hard to believe they're overwhelmingly unsanitary.
> The chinese government supressed info about this virus.
This on the other hand is a good point.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2019/08/13/health/dole-spinach-recall-sa...
[2] https://www.cdc.gov/ecoli/2019/o157h7-11-19/index.html
[3] https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/e-coli
This article seems to be doing a motte-and-bailey of grossing you out with things that are just “regular meat wholesaler things” (e.g. fresh meat sitting out on ice without refrigeration) and then moralizing about the specific kinds of meats available in certain markets in China.
As far as I can tell, the author really just wants to tell Chinese people to stop eating certain meats (pragmatically, bush meats; but also, less pragmatically, whatever a Westerner would find gauche, like endangered species or things we’d consider pets), but doesn’t want to come out and say what they really mean; and so instead tries to seem like they’re making a point about sanitation. In so doing, they end up arguing against the existence of wholesale meat markets in general, which is clearly silly: meat wholesaling happens all over the world every day and is perfectly sanitary, despite seeming to a layman like it’d be unsanitary. (It is unsanitary in some ways, but in general principle—which can certainly be violated, like any other standard can—it’s always exactly as sanitary as it needs to be for any given use-case. Meats that are cooked get treated with less care; meats that are served raw are treated with more.)
This sort of reminds me of the parable of the new owner who came into a bakery and demanded it be cleaned because everything was greasy. The bakers kindly informed them that the grease was intentionally put on every surface, right after cleaning; and that, in fact, grease is used to clean some surfaces. Some systems function perfectly well in ways that seem disturbing to outsiders. If the bakers have been greasing the bakery for thousands of years, and you’ve never gotten sick from a loaf of bread, then maybe think a moment before telling the bakers to stop greasing the bakery.
Certainly, if you buy a loaf of bread and it turns out to have a bunch of thumbtacks in it, there’s a problem. But not one, I would suspect, endemic to the concept of bakeries.
1) The wet market is full of live animals in close proximity and very unsanitary conditions. So pathogens are more likely to still be alive, and can jump between diverse hosts, not just to humans.
2) The wet market is full of non-domesticated, exotic animals which carry pathogens humans are not acquainted to.
And yet, nobody gets sick from that. Food poisoning in your sushi or your raw oysters, every time it’s been followed up, has turned out to be from the source (farming in bad conditions) or from transport (shipping hundreds of miles in non-refrigerated trucks), not from cross-contamination at a market.
Thus my point: clearly, some markets keep generating diseases; but if they’re doing the same thing as the markets that don’t generate diseases, then it’s likely not wet markets as a process for distributing food that are the problem here. Because some of them—almost all of them, in fact—work just fine. (Analogy: are “restaurants” a vector for disease? Not in general, no. Specific ones, certainly. But not as a concept. Something additional has to be going on.)
So, if you eliminate the process itself, what’s left? The inventory and its sourcing; the people and their own personal hygiene; and a few other things. In any case much less tasteful topics to argue about. Which is why people would prefer that this not be about those things, and instead be some endemic issue to meat markets.
A reasonable restriction would be on wet markets for mammals, excepting a few where the safety properties are well known like cows.
No it's not.
You're off by two orders of magnitude of number of different and wild species. That's THE key. The variation and combinations of vicera and species.
"...live wolf pups, golden cicadas, scorpions, bamboo rats, squirrels, foxes, civets, hedgehogs (probably porcupines), salamanders, turtles and crocodiles. In addition, it offered assorted parts of some animals, such as crocodile tail, belly, tongue and intestines...."
from
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/jan/24/calls-for-gl...
As human beings, when we make a mistake that leads to diseases that kill people, we do what we can to avoid making that same mistake twice. I'm not sure why this is an objectionable or questionable notion.
Vox has a video explaining "Why new diseases keep appearing in China" [1]. They include footage of Chinese wet markets around the 2:00 mark. I think they make an excellent case for strictly regulating, or even outright banning wet markets.
Long ago, Europe had the same problem. The cities were full of wet markets, and were basically the perfect conditions for creating new plagues. There's a nice CGP Grey video on this, "Americapox: The Missing Plague" [2].
[1]: https://youtu.be/TPpoJGYlW54 [2]: https://youtu.be/JEYh5WACqEk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=98&v=TPpoJGYlW54...
Wet markets should be banned because they contain endangered species and the vendors are committing horrible animal rights abuses, oh and they are responsible for multiple corona viruses too.
That's exactly the question I have. How are these Chinese markets fundamentally different from, say, the Japanese Tsukiji fish market? Taking a look at pictures like https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vendors_begin_sell... it doesn't strike me as very much different from the Chinese wet markets.
You are probably refering to Making Wrong Code Look Wrong by Joel Spolsky: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/05/11/making-wrong-code-...
How?
Let us be clear about this: A 'wet market' is
> a market selling fresh meat, fish, produce, and other perishable goods as distinguished from "dry markets" which sell durable goods such as fabric and electronics
Fish & Meat counters exist at literally every large supermarket in the UK, is she planning on banning Billingsgate Market? Or, have we just come up with a term 'wet market' - that no one actually has heard before, dressed it up as some asian odity and then decided we need to ban it?
Wet markets aren't a particularly likely place for pandemics to spawn from (let's ignore the fact that there a literally hundreds of thousands of them operating every day). We're not fighting off dozens of epidemics. The thing that enables these outbreaks is bad food hygeine standards, and that doens't improve by banning anything we've decided is vaguely foreign and scary.
Here's a Michelin starred chef going to a wet market to find you the highest quality fish to cook: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GTTXJKZ08Q
Closing the markets is the most straightforward solution. We must be decisive about this, it's the only reasonable option.
They don't keep live fruit bats in African markets. Ebola happened nonetheless.
In fact, keeping live animals is a very sensible thing to do when there is no cold chain. It is the traditional way to insure that the meat you buy is safe(ish).
Remarkable that you place the blame on people rather than the many governments that acted far too slowly.
Why would you ever waste part of something you killed for sustenance? Waste is waste.
> There’s an old Cantonese saying that goes, ‘anything that walks, swims, crawls, or flies with its back to heaven is edible’.
I mean, it is, and frequently, it's delicious. Meat is meat, ya know, I care more about how the animal lived up until it ended up on my plate, not what animal specifically (so long as it's not endangered).
> The myth that freshly killed animals taste superior is very pervasive, particularly among the older generation. ‘Freshly killed hens are much better than frozen meat in supermarkets, if you want to make perfect chicken soup,’ a 60-year-old woman named Ran told Bloomberg while shopping at a Chinese wet market. ‘The flavor is richer.’
It probably is.
They jump from one species of animal (dead or alive) to humans.
How can we pragmatically reduce the risk?
1. Ban markets where two different species are kept close to each other.
2. Identify species that are high risk. Ban eating them if they are not essential (other than domesticated animals).
3. For domesticated animals, have tough safety regulations.
4. For villages/cities near wild populations of high risk exotic animals (bats), have a system of monitoring.
5. Provide new jobs for people that are affected by the above restrictions so we don't drive them underground away from regulations.
There is no evidence at all that 'wet markets' are the source of this.
If there is an issue it is the hunting of wild animal for food and that is not specific to China, see Ebola, etc.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
Anecdotally: I ate the best tasting salmon I've had for a long while. It was frozen salmon from ALDI.
In addition, factory farming is arguably worse than wet markets, with plenty of diseases originating from it so far.
Doesn't insisting otherwise make you a US regime apologist?
There are markets that get emptied out and thoroughly cleaned every night, and sellers bring fresh fish and domesticated slaughter every morning.
A call for the wholesale ban of wet markets without acknowledging that plenty of safe wet markets exist is hard to take seriously.
They were banned after SARS and that worked, no new diseases from China for a few years. Then they were permitted again and we got MERS and now COVID-19.
China needs to learn its lesson for good this time...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henipavirus#Hendra_virus
Also human to human orthohantavirus in South America.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andes_orthohantavirus
So it's not just China here. People can dream of punishing China all they want but the basic problem isn't going away.
You can't stop it happening naturally. That's just life. You can stop shitty wet markets and poor hygiene/food safety causing it to happen regularly. And you can stop letting it spread because you the CCP can't handle bad news.
I don't care which animals people eat or what country their in. But if the way they behave causes these viruses, they need to change. If they won't, we need to stop trading with them and prevent all travel between us. That's not punishment, it's public safety.
Chinese wet-markets sell camels? Really?