Posted on 02/14/2020 12:38:43 PM PST by Oldeconomybuyer
BEIJING - China cracked down on the sale of exotic species after an outbreak of a new virus in 2002 was linked to markets selling live animals. The germ turned out to be a coronavirus that caused SARS.
The ban was later lifted, and the animals reappeared. Now another coronavirus is spreading through China, so far killing 1,380 people and sickening more than 64,000 - eight times the number sickened by SARS.
The suspected origin? The same type of market.
With more than 60 million people under lockdown in more than a dozen Chinese cities, the new outbreak is prompting calls to permanently ban the sale of wildlife, which many say is being fueled by a limited group of wealthy people who consider the animals delicacies. The spreading illness also serves as a grim reminder that how animals are handled anywhere can endanger people everywhere.
“There’s a vast number of viruses in the animal world that have not spread to humans, and have the potential to do so,” said Robert Webster, an expert on influenza viruses at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee.
The Wuhan market like many other “wet markets” in Asia and elsewhere, where animals are tied up or stacked in cages. Activists say it’s difficult to distinguish between those that were legally farmed and those that may have been illegally hunted. The animals are often killed on site to ensure freshness. The messy mix raises the tiny odds that a new virus will jump to people handling the animals and start to spread, experts say.
(Excerpt) Read more at apnews.com ...
Yeah, where’s PETA when you really need them...?
I predict that the market will be reopened again, regardless of what they do short term.
It’s a convenient excuse if anything escapes from the Wuhan Level 4 lab. Maybe that’s what happened this time, maybe not. But, it could happen, and a lot of face would be saved if the disease appeared to originate in the live market... again.
“The messy mix raises the tiny odds that a new virus will jump to people handling the animals and start to spread, experts say.”
Unless it comes from animals stolen from a lab that’s working on viruses. Someone posted on another thread that this is the story they heard from someone inside China who worked at the Wuhan lab. Animals were supposedly stolen & then sold to the wet market & that’s how the virus got out.
“Yeah, where’s PETA when you really need them...?”
They have been busy trying to get horse racing outlawed in California. It’s easier to co-opt the woke socialist gov’t of Sacramento than to scold China.
JMHo
“It’s a convenient excuse if anything escapes from the Wuhan Level 4 lab. “
It’s a convenient excuse if anything ELSE escapes from the Wuhan Level 4 lab.
We’re saying the same thing, mostly.
I just said it hasn’t been proven that the current virus escaped, but it could have. And the market provides plausible deniability for this incident and the next.
The animal kingdom fighting back with germ warfare.
The animal kingdom fighting back with germ warfare.
These stupid a##es eat anything that moves
They think it mostly targets Asians, because Europeans, Africans, and North and South Americans don’t have it.
It was a bizarre thing to read. Real conspiracy stuff. Even mentioned the US holds the Ebola patent, whatever that means. I would think it was freely available for anyone to be killed by, myself.
I appreciate out of the box thinking, but it was a solid stream of anti-US propaganda, with China the victim, because the US wants to stay the biggest economy in the world and China was going to eclipse it.
Remember...more than half the world gets their news from CNN!!!
I read somewhere that the workers at the lab were stealing the lab animals...especially the bats...and selling them to the wild game market.
I saw speculation to that effect, not enough to be more than a guess, IMHO. I mean, not what what I read.
probably Trump’s fault
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