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It's important not to demonize Chinese people here. However, it's at the very least equally important to ensure that their agricultural practices stop producing

• oiasdjfoiasd 7y ago
  American Swine Flu in 2009 killed tens of thousands of people. To say it could not have happened anywhere is wrong.
  • reaperducer 7y ago
    American Swine Flu 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" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_flu_pandemic#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_flu_pandemic#History
  • TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
    I believe the parent comment meant the frequency of these viruses coming out of wet market environments is higher than other agricultural practices.
    • arcticbull 7y ago
      Is there data to back that up?
      • TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
        I'm not sure. My intend was only to point out what I believed the previous comment meant.
  • makomk 7y ago
    I don't think we're actually sure where swine flu originated. It was first identified in America, but that might just be because their flu surveillance is better than other countries.
• jonny_eh 7y ago
  > This is a direct consequence of their agricultural practices 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.
  • yellow_postit 7y ago
    This would also tamp down on poaching and general animal abuse. The challenge is unless you reduce the actual demand for TCM you will just shift to black/gray markets which is likely net worse. I don’t know how to reduce that demand except through education and generational change.
  • JohnJamesRambo 7y ago
    It is utterly bizarre to believe that eating different animal flesh will provide some sort of unique medicinal properties. It’s all pretty much muscle or fat tissue which is all very similar between wildly different organisms. Animals aren’t like plants or fungi which make a huge library of secondary metabolite compounds that do work as medicine. Like all archaic belief systems, let us hope that with enough time the light of science shines in.
    • m-p-3 7y ago
      With the amount of people who believes vaccines cause autism, pardon me for being pessimistic.. 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.
    • juiyout 7y ago
      It may be bizarre. I grew up on traditional Chinese medicine in Taiwan. Vast majority I had was various types of plants like you mentioned in power, pellet, or pill form very similar to western medicine. There is some medicine extracted from animal products like musk, honey, etc, though much less used. 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.
• asclepi 7y ago
  I agree, demonizing the Chinese people is the worst thing anyone can do. They didn't want this virus either, but they taught us how we can contain it, and they paid the price with countless human lives. 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.
  • adultSwim 7y ago
    The CCP aggressively fought the virus, giving us time (we wasted) to prepare.
    • asclepi 7y ago
      They did, but they also wasted a lot of time in January, allowing the virus to travel the world. But as you mentioned, other nations made similar mistakes, and they had the benefit of being warned. However, when it comes to the question of responsibility for preventing a third SARS outbreak originating from China, the answer lies with the CCP.
    • oarabbus_ 7y ago
      The CCP silenced the doctors who tried to sound the alarm and made numerous missteps. They should be held accountable. https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-it-all-started-chinas-early-coronavirus-missteps-11583508932 https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-it-all-started-chinas-early...
    • gruez 7y ago
      >giving us time (we wasted) to prepare. If that's anything to go by, we're fucked when it comes to climate change.
    • benrbray 7y ago
      I'm sorry, what? They only started to do the right thing once they realized a cover-up wouldn't be successful [1]. Even then, we're still hearing about attempts to silence scientists and destroy evidence. [1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/01/world/asia/china-coronavirus.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/01/world/asia/china-coronavi...
• coliveira 7y ago
  China is not only place where these viruses appear. The swine flu appeared in North America, some kinds of flu appeared in other places like the Middle East. The only thing special about China is that it has a lot of people, so there is a higher probability of human-virus contact.
  • darawk 7y ago
    It's true that these viruses have arisen in other places. But it is not true that there is nothing special about China. Chinese wet markets are uniquely susceptible to the generation of these sorts of pathogens, for reasons that are explained all over in the comments of this thread, and in the original article.
  • himinlomax 7y ago
    The swine flu was manageable, because it's a type of flu. 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.
    • notacoward 7y ago
      > The swine flu was manageable, because it's a type of flu. 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.
      • himinlomax 7y ago
        You say Kansas, some people have pointed at China. I read a book a long time ago that said France, more specifically a US or UK military camp where pigs, horses, chickens and wounded men were in close quarters. 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.
• Lio 7y ago
  Traditional Medicine is a disgrace. As is any other kind of “alternative” medicine regardless of which culture it springs from. It’s either medicine or it’s not medicine; there is no third category. 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.
  • mytailorisrich 7y ago
    Traditional medicine includes the use of medicinal plants, which usually turn out to have actual properties.
    • Lio 7y ago
      “usually” is a very dangerous word. 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.
      • mytailorisrich 7y ago
        Things are of course not black and white...
        • emaz1ng 7y ago
          Actually, in medicine and math things are black and white. It's science.
• synaesthesisx 7y ago
  Imagine the unlucky individual that undercooked a bat and triggered a global pandemic and recession.
• Waterluvian 7y ago
  I don't think we should go out of our way to be racist. But I'm struggling to be outraged by a spade being called a spade. Apparently the origin of CV-19 wasn't random. Maybe China deserves however amount of international shaming is required to evoke reform. Or better than shaming is actual penalties. Maybe we ban wet markets and blacklist nations who allow them.
  • skoutus 7y ago
    I'm not here to defend selling bushmeat or the trade of wildlife for "medicine", but wet markets are simply markets where farmers can set up stalls and sell directly to consumers, including livestock and meat. Yes, it doesn't have the same sanitation code as supermarkets, but these wet markets are actually just what regular markets looked like 100 years ago. There's nothing nefarious going on there that breeds pandemic, except for the ones where they trade bushmeat, but these are exceptions; and the problem is the bushmeat, not the wet market. 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.
    • Waterluvian 7y ago
      I think I hear what you're saying. It's about perspective. But I also think you made my point when you said "what regular markets looked like 100 years ago." That's exactly the problem. So yeah, they're not some evil contraption you'd see in a James Bond chase scene. But they're stuck in the past and our health standards have gone way up since then. 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.
      • skoutus 7y ago
        1. No one is saying "let the people die". Health and safety standards should be raised as we gain more understanding of health risks. My point is that we need to increase the safety standards and health codes at wet markets, beginning first by banning the wildlife trade and bushmeat. 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.
• philwelch 7y ago
  No culture has a monopoly on this type of behavior. For instance, it's widely believed that HIV was introduced to the human population by African populations eating monkeys and apes. It's well past time that we recognize that eating unsanitary, exotic meats is a threat to the entire human population. For as bad as the ensuing epidemics have become, the relative difficulty of transmitting HIV and the relative survivability of SARS-CoV-2 are enormous strokes of luck; we won't always be this lucky.
  • darawk 7y ago
    Totally agree. There's places everyone can improve upon with regard to things like this, but wet markets are an obvious starting place, I think.
• kleer001 7y ago
  It's important not to confuse a people with their government, especially when said government is totalitarian and eminently corrupt. > 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.
• skoutus 7y ago
  > This is a direct consequence of their agricultural practices 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.
  • FpUser 7y ago
    I suspect it wont be long before someone calls your post whataboutism. I relatively recently discovered HN and originally had high hopes bot those quickly evaporated. It looks to me that "exercise evidence-based reasoning" and HN are 2 things that do not have much in common. And the system of downvotiong does not make it any better.
  • thu2111 7y ago
    There have been a lot of papers and investigations that suggested a link to wet markets for this and prior pandemics of respiratory diseases. Here's a paper from 2004: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0140673603153299 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.
    • skoutus 7y ago
      Thanks for sharing that particular report. There's a couple of things worth pointing out. 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.
• notacoward 7y ago
  Terminology alert: this has nothing to do with agricultural practices, since agriculture is the farming of plants. Pastoral practices are barely relevant either, since the disease is thought to have arisen from the practice of consuming wild animals.