Maybe the next virus will bring the zombie apocalypse we’ve all been waiting for.
Wet? I love PCP.
dippies?
makes me hungry
As long as they have super strict cleaning and hygiene rules!! No more new viruses jumping from animals to humans please
It makes me feel confused. What is a “wet market?”
You point out the animal you want then they slaughter it for you - right there, on the premises.
Good luck with that
Just wanna point out that China’s not the only place where new diseases have popped up to threaten humans. If I’m not mistaken, Mad Cow started in the UK, MERS arose in the Middle East, and Ebola in Africa. Truthfully; any area with livestock runs the risk of exposing people to diseases that can jump from species to species.
There’s definitely a need for stricter regulations of sanitary conditions and hygiene in these markets but I don’t think it’s fair to jump on China.
Wet (referring to the live butchering that takes place) markets in China are cages stacked on top of each other, with multiple species (including live dogs), wild animals, and all live, unhealthy, and abused.
The perfect breeding ground for a virus which transfers from animals to humans. And there are thousands of wet markets in China.
The one in Wuhan is just 1.5 kilometers away from a biological research facility which handles live viruses. What could go possibly go wrong?
think about the seafood section at your local supermarket…
then put it outside, next to a bunch of other of those, but instead of ‘areas’, they are little open-air shutter-style garages. and everyone meanders in and out with live and dead animals, and the live ones sometimes leave dead. and there are trays and whanots and things everywhere… the risk for cross-contamination, and crossover, are likely, not just by chance
Wet markets alone aren’t the reason to jump on china. They hid this whole outbreak for months. Held supplies also. Imagine if every country had an extra 2 months to prepare. How many lives could’ve been saved. Thats why I jump on china.
Exactly. They also “vanished” people who tried to sound the alarm and tried to blame the outbreak on US soldiers!
I agree with you, but I suspect the US would have wasted the extra two months anyway
It isn’t like they weren’t plenty warned about this kind of behavior back in the early 2000’s
when SARS and MRSA originated from the same practice.
And the head of the World Health Organization was put in power by China so “Bros, I got your back!”
Not justifying this practice by any means—that’s obviously deplorable—but you see similar conditions in large-scale facilities here in the US with pigs, turkeys, etc. It’s why we pump our livestock full of antibiotics. Sure we may have better sanitary standards in terms of butchering but let’s be real here: this goes on to varying degrees here in the US.
That’s 100% fair. But at least here in the US, our response hasn’t exactly been lightning speed. It’s widely accepted that the CDC and feds squandered weeks when they finally did start paying attention to this, and there are reports that members of Congress had been briefed on this in January (I believe the Senate Health Committee) with members of the medical and scientific communities starting to raise concerns even earlier. That’s not to mention the fact that we’ve been unprepared for years for something like this and known it. I think last year or the year before, when the military was running its war games, they found our pandemic response to be inadequate. And you can hear concerns popping up here and there for over a decade! I watched Jon Stewart’s appearance on Crossfire back in 2004 recently and Wolf Blitzer was advertising a piece on flu vaccine shortages and doubts about our national readiness to face a widespread epidemic. I mean, there are still several states not implementing social distancing and stay-at-home orders!
Sure, China has a lot to answer for. But at the same time, it’s one piece of a larger, system-wide problem both here in the US and abroad. China’s just the easy scapegoat right now.
If China quarantine the whole country in late January doesn’t sound like a warning, then what is a warning? All I remember is the media accusing China of quarantined millions of people back in January.
A month ago (I think less than that) the mayor of NYC was telling people there was nothing to be afraid of… I cringe when I hear the term “herd immunity” - only because the word “herd” is how most people in power think of the general populace. We are their livestock…
Yeah. And there are still people in power here in the US who are downplaying the severity of this pandemic, not to mention people who still gather and don’t observe social distancing.
Look, the points against China and its wet markets are certainly valid. But I think we all need to look at what we did as a nation to respond, both governmentally and individually/culturally, instead of pointing at China and saying it’s all their fault. But that’s the harder thing to do than just blaming someone else.
Edit: ultimately, diseases happen no matter what safeguards are put in place. It’s what we do when they or other disasters happen that we should be scrutinizing.
Article that’s been misused.
The findings reinforce suspicions that bat coronaviruses capable of directly infecting humans (rather than first needing to evolve in an intermediate animal host) may be more common than previously thought, the researchers say.
From 2015.
https://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates_the_next_outbreak_we_re_not_ready
and the most important one…