The sars outbreak of 2002 is also linked to bats. I wonder if when this outbreak is over if they go back to eating bats because "our traditions and culture". It's not a staple food like chicken or pigs.
https://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2012/08/07/15822...
This is a business in Florida that serves smoked fruit bats.
You know.. it’s the exact same type of bat that’s being linked to the coronavirus in China.
That's a singular business (in an article from 2012), not hundreds of dangerous, wet markets that presently exist all across China serving tens of millions of people.
Show me the figures on the number of people in the US eating bats, versus China. Bat is not considered a common delicacy in the US. It's considered an extremely bizarre thing to eat bat in the US.
In fact bats are so rarely consumed in the US, it's difficult to find information on it:
Seems to have gone out of business. Doesn't exactly seem like serving bats was popular enough for them to stay afloat.
It was determined to be civets for SARS and I heard it was believed it might be pangolins for the new virus (but don't quote me on this).
AFAIK, it shouldn't be possible for the bats viruses we know to make the jump directly to humans.
So eating bats wasn't the cause of the outbreak in SARS and isn't the cause either for the new virus.
Edit. Here’s a link but not sure if this was the one https://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-02-22/queensland-boy-dies-o...
I just heard that for this particular virus (the bat virus believed to be the ancestor of 2019-nCov), transmission to human without an intermediary was very unlikely since the bat version used a receptor that doesn't have an equivalent in human to infect cells.
Any animal, wild or domestic, can theoretically transmit diseases to humans if the conditions are right.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5389864/
Also, the lancet publication found that the first diagnoses on December 1st had no link to the seafood market
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
Furthermore, university of Toronto just published a model showing likely start of the outbreak was November, which aligns with first reported diagnoses in December.
https://www.utoronto.ca/news/model-built-u-t-researchers-sug...
On that basis we should at the very least be cautious of the bat soup intermediary theory, and the media should stop reporting it as a fact that it was the source of the outbreak.
Seriously, the press is notoriously bad at reporting stuff like that, like all complex potetialy scary things. I just thought that a community like HN would be wiser than falling for Dunning-Kruger about the own competency when it comes to diseases, and to go down the twitter / Youtube / "dark corners of the internet" hole.
These are all peer reviewed journals. There are no links to twitter / youtube / dark corners of the internet here. You assume that commenters on HN don't have experience working in this field.
I feel like this comment has been made without an insight into a biosafety lab's day to day workings or reading those papers from an informed perspective - so assuming a Dunning-Kruger effect through a lack of understanding of the person submitting the comments on HN. I believe this would be classed as a relativist-fallacy.
It's equivalent to an American TV person eating fried cricket on a stick in Thailand, or fermented fish in Iceland..
You forgot to add "in western culture"