How China’s wildlife food market created a new coronavirus… again
Caged civet cats to be sold as meat in wildlife market in China. (AP photo/Xinhua)
Today (Monday, March 9), there are 113,000 confirmed cases of the covid-19 as the disease spreads, leaving countries scrambling to contain it. Covid-19, short for coronavirus disease 2019, is believed to have spawned in the Huanan Food Market in Wuhan, China.
Scientists narrowed the origins of the disease because 27 of the 41 first covid-19 cases were people who had all visited the Huanan Food Market, according to Prof. Chaolin Huang's report published in The Lancet journals.
In 2003, SARS, another strand of the coronavirus, was introduced to the world, killing almost 800 people world-wide before containment. SARS, like the new strand of coronavirus, originated in a food market as well. How is it that the same country seems to have been responsible for two viral diseases from the same large family of viruses?
Two starving children. (LIFE Magazine)
In the 1970s, as famine had killed over 36 million in China, the communist regime that controlled the food market removed restrictions that banned the farming of wild animals as they struggled to produce poultry, beef, and fish at a rate fast enough to feed over 900 million people, According to Vox.com.
Dr. Peter Li, Associate Professor at the University of Houston-Downtown, is a specialist in China Policy. Li said in an interview with Global Animal Network, "Today's Chinese mainlanders are not just consuming meat from farm animals; they are also consuming more fish and other animal products such as wildlife."
According to Li, the communist regime of 1978 normalized and legalized private farming, which allowed "peasants" oppressed into a food supply crisis to make a living and feed their families through wildlife farming.
Fast forward to 2003, and China has a robust wildlife farming industry, but the conditions of many of these privatized farms are an incubator for disease.
In an interview with Vox.com, Li said, "The cages are stacked one over another. Animals at the bottom are often soaked with all kinds of liquids. Animal excrement, pus, blood. Whatever the liquid they are receiving from the animals above."
This type of sharing of fluids is what creates new and contagious diseases. When these disease-carrying fluids are shared and eventually consumed by humans, the infection can spread rapidly.
Since the outbreak, China has implemented a temporary ban on wildlife trade and consumption in hopes of containing covid-19 from further spread. However, the ban is not yet permanent, leaving many concerned that China would lift the ban as with SARS in 2003.
A permanent shift in policy would lead to a change in Chinese culture, as the past four decades of meat consumption, especially exotic meats, have increased. Additionally, an adverse effect on the economy if China cracks down on private farm's wildlife animal production.
As covid-19 sickens thousands world-wide, increases tensions between the U.S. and China, and threatens China's farming industry, monitoring China's policy on wildlife farming is worth the world's attention.
