5 ms·
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 m
by 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.
- thu2111 7y agoGood analysis, thanks. My confidence in that conclusion is now lower.