Time to Ban Wet Markets
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spectator.us
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"
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.
[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.
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?
>“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,”
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.
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.
This is not anecdata either, there are well done studies supporting this.
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?
1. It seems that COVID-19 may not have come from the market in the first place:
https://www.businessinsider.com/wuhan-coronavirus-may-not-ha...
2. TCM may have its flaws, but it has its successes too. Artemisinin comes to mind: TCM appears to have been spot on and led to the best currently available treatment for malaria.
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.
Anecdotally: I ate the best tasting salmon I've had for a long while. It was frozen salmon from ALDI.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
China was able to effectively mobilize in ways that are putting us to shame. We should follow their lead and our own path to success in WWII.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
In addition, factory farming is arguably worse than wet markets, with plenty of diseases originating from it so far.