There are many more coronaviruses in the wild and we will continue to see pandemics until unsanitary practices like wet markets with exotic animal products are outlawed.
Simian Inmunodeficiency Virus (SIV) could jump to humans, becoming HIV, through the manipulation of raw meat from infected apes.
We have immunity or at least some control over diseases coming from more common species of cattle.
There are many potential sources for serious zoonotic diseases. As long as we keep large number of pigs and chickens in farms there'll be the possibility of a flu pandemic caused by viruses going from humans to animals and back.
I don't believe a 'wet market' is any worse than a confined animal feeding operation in terms of breeding pestilence.
CAFOs have continued to exist through indiscriminate use of antibiotics, but the potential future impact of their practices seems like it's even bigger than the impact of bush meat in a wet market
(Also, the wet markets are not the definitive source of sars-2. I thought the pangolin-as-pets trade seemed to be the more likely source?)
> we will continue to see pandemics until unsanitary practices like wet markets with exotic animal products are outlawed
I'm really no expert and don't know what to think, but Wikipedia asserts that as of April 2020 investigations are still trying to determine whether the Huanan market was really the source of COVID19. Even if it was, can we even conclude getting rid of these markets would solve pandemics as a general problem?
So at this point we can't really say the "fix" is to remove these markets, can we?
Epidemics are a statistical game, not a black-and-white one.
We aren't realistically out to completely eliminate high-mortality pandemics, but reduce the changes. E.g., perhaps we can make the hundred year event a thousand year event, and the population mortality 1-2% rather than 10-20%.
The question is not whether the Wuhan wet market was definitively the origin of SARS-Cov-2/Covid-19 in humans, but whether it, and similar markets significantly increase the chances of a similar event in the future.
> So at this point we can't really say the "fix" is to remove these markets, can we?
Yes, I think we can. Given what we know of how viruses evolve, mutate and the mechanisms by which they move from various animals to humans, we want to minimize the points where people come into contact with large amounts and variety of raw animal matter in highly unsanitary conditions. Wet markets are probably the lowest hanging fruit in that category.
I'm unconvinced that minimizing contact with raw animal meat markets -- in what you call "the lowest hanging fruit" -- would "fix" the problem with these kinds of pandemics. Not until we know they are the major factor in spreading the infection. Maybe it would help, or not, but "fix"?
Note I'm not disagreeing better sanitary conditions are desirable. I'm disagreeing -- or rather, casting doubt because I'm unconvinced -- that [quote] "we will continue to see pandemics until unsanitary practices like wet markets with exotic animal products are outlawed".
If there is a firm conclusion that this was indeed the major factor, sure. My comment was that, according to articles linked to from Wikipedia, the jury still seems to be out on this.
It is known it comes from certain animals, like bats.
So, how can the virus jump from a bat to a human, either directly or indirectly?
Sure, you can randomly run into a bat anywhere in the world. I know a person that found a bat in her balcony some weeks ago.
But the probability that the virus jumps across species is low. You have to increase the odds, and a good way of doing that is creating a wet market full of them.
And it has been known for a long time that those markets were a disaster waiting to happen.
Maybe it happened like that, maybe it didn't. The Wikipedia page on the (possibly) zoonotic origins of SARS-CoV-2 mentions lots of questions and uncertainties, including whether the Huanan wet market was the source at all (because of the raw meat) or simply a place where infected people spread it:
I'm not going to quote every paragraph casting doubt, but take a look at this (from Wikipedia):
> The first known infections from the SARS-CoV-2 strain were discovered in Wuhan, China.[12] The original source of viral transmission to humans remains unclear, as does whether the strain became pathogenic before or after the spillover event.[18][57][15] Because many of the first individuals found to be infected by the virus were workers at the Huanan Seafood Market,[58][59] it has been suggested that the strain might have originated from the market.[15][60] However, other research indicates that visitors may have introduced the virus to the market, which then facilitated rapid expansion of the infections.
Note that "facilitating rapid expansion" may simply mean that because it was a place with a lot of people grouped together, the infection could have spread more easily -- the reason we need social distancing now -- but it doesn't automatically mean it has to do with raw meat of exotic animals.
Now, it can be the problem is raw meat after all! But it seems to me research is still ongoing about whether this was the real culprit. That's all I'm saying.
> Serological evidence for SARS CoV in human beings working in these markets, taken together with the earliest cases of SARS in restaurant workers, supports the contention of a potential zoonotic origin for SARS. WHERE NEXT? Will SARS reappear?
I'm not saying we should discount this, and in fact it's a reasonable hypothesis.
But the fact remains it's still under investigation; we do not (yet) know where and how it originated for certain, or whether the origin was an exotic meat wet market.
Even that bats were involved is not certain.
If we do not know this, we cannot know whether closing exotic meat wet markets is a major thing we can do to stop these pandemics.
Ah! The blame game. I'm uninterested in the obsession with blaming the CCP for everything. This and similar pandemics are mankind's problem. China and the ruling party want to solve it too, regardless of how they initially (mis)handled the situation.
We may or may not find patient zero and/or the root cause of the pandemic, but blaming the CCP is pointless.
It's not like other huge parts of the world don't have raw meat wet markets with unsanitary conditions, either. And that's if they were the cause for the pandemic to begin with.
> There are many more coronaviruses in the wild and we will continue to see pandemics until unsanitary practices like wet markets with exotic animal products are outlawed.
Before trying to find a global definition for "exotic" we could start with washing hands or not sneezing or coughing at people nearby.
Sneezing and coughing, sure, but lots of folks don't have easy access to clean water, a problem that is likely to exacerbate over the next few decades. Excessive hand washing among the people who do isn't gonna help a lot particularly in drought-prone areas.
I don't think it is a bad idea to keep looking for ways to prevent these outbreaks as close to whatever their origin is as possible.
Note that in some very poor countries (India comes to mind) it's not at all clear that more total lives are saved via lockdowns since they will result in famine and all sorts of other terrible consequences.
In Africa folks are worried about a huge spike in malaria that could dwarf the projected CoVid impact in certain populations.
Every country for themselves and the current lockdown strategies are what we are gonna get, and I'm not angry about it since the action-reaction-logic of all of this is pretty straightforward, but it's not at all quite clear to me that it leads to the fewest number of human casualties vs just some local minima.
> Excessive hand washing among the people who do isn't gonna help a lot particularly in drought-prone areas.
I am a European who has been living about 100km north of Western Sahara for a few years now: People here wash hands much more often than Europeans or US Americans and they know how to do so using much less water. More often than not, in restaurants, with European guests, I have to point out that "I am going to wash my hands" before eating so that everyone does it - despite locals and me visibly having done so when entering the restaurant (that all have facilities to clean your hands in the dining room or directly at the entrance).
In Berlin, for 15 years I was pissing people off by pointing out they did not wash their hands after using the restroom. Pro tip: Wait until they are back at their table and then congratulate their friends on having such a close group where nobody minds sharing a bowl of peanuts with the guy who just did not wash his hands...
> I don't think it is a bad idea to keep looking for ways to prevent these outbreaks as close to whatever their origin is as possible.
Not at all, but let's not forget that these markets are the only ones in a lot of places. People rely on them for food and income: Where I live the next proper supermarket is a 2.5h drive either north or south. People from small villages walk to the closest souk (market) once a week to sell their goods.
Furthermore, whenever people in the first world blame "unhygienic wet markets" that sell "exotic food" I am very careful:
* What's exotic for a US-American might be a staple for someone else;
* What the tourist buys might be something the same vendor would not dare to sell to locals (but tourists leave after a few days, so no impact on the customer base);
* Preparation matters: Down here meat is always well done and vegetables are always cooked to death. Notable exceptions: tourists who explicitly order meat medium or medium rare.
So, given that the markets are essential for the locals and that we 1st-world citizens cannot maintain a decent hygiene, I still think we should start with ourselves before banning "exotic" behaviour.
Simian Inmunodeficiency Virus (SIV) could jump to humans, becoming HIV, through the manipulation of raw meat from infected apes.
We have immunity or at least some control over diseases coming from more common species of cattle.