WHO Points To Wildlife Farms In Southwest China As Likely Source of Pandemic (npr.org) 293
Thelasko shares a report from NPR: A member of the World Health Organization investigative team says wildlife farms in southern China are the most likely source of the COVID-19 pandemic. China shut down those wildlife farms in February 2020, says Peter Daszak, a disease ecologist with EcoHealth Alliance and part of the WHO delegation that travelled to China earlier this year. During that trip, Daszak says, the WHO team found new evidence that these wildlife farms were supplying vendors at the Huanan market in Wuhan with animals.
Daszak told NPR that the government response was a strong signal that the Chinese government thought those farms were the most probable pathway for a coronavirus in bats southern China to reach humans in Wuhan. Those wildlife farms, including ones in the Yunnan region, are a part of a unique project that the Chinese government has been promoting for 20 years now. "They take exotic animals, like civets, porcupines, pangolins, raccoon dogs and bamboo rats, and they breed them in captivity," says Daszak. The agency is expected to release the team's investigative findings in the next two weeks. In the meantime, Daszak gave NPR a highlight of what they figured out. "China promoted the farming of wildlife as a way to alleviate rural populations out of poverty," Daszak says. The farms helped the government meet ambitious goals of closing the rural-urban divide, as NPR reported last year. "It was very successful," Daszak says. "In 2016, they had 14 million people employed in wildlife farms, and it was a $70 billion industry." Then on February 24, 2020, right when the outbreak in Wuhan was winding down, the Chinese government "put out a declaration saying that they were going to stop the farming of wildlife for food," says Daszak.
The farms were then shut down. "They sent out instructions to the farmers about how to safely dispose of the animals -- to bury, kill or burn them -- in a way that didn't spread disease." Daszak thinks the government did this because these farms could be where the coronavirus jumped from a bat into another animal and then into people. During WHO's mission to China, NPR reports that "Daszak said the team found new evidence that these farms were supplying vendors at the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan, where an early outbreak of COVID occurred."
Daszak told NPR that the government response was a strong signal that the Chinese government thought those farms were the most probable pathway for a coronavirus in bats southern China to reach humans in Wuhan. Those wildlife farms, including ones in the Yunnan region, are a part of a unique project that the Chinese government has been promoting for 20 years now. "They take exotic animals, like civets, porcupines, pangolins, raccoon dogs and bamboo rats, and they breed them in captivity," says Daszak. The agency is expected to release the team's investigative findings in the next two weeks. In the meantime, Daszak gave NPR a highlight of what they figured out. "China promoted the farming of wildlife as a way to alleviate rural populations out of poverty," Daszak says. The farms helped the government meet ambitious goals of closing the rural-urban divide, as NPR reported last year. "It was very successful," Daszak says. "In 2016, they had 14 million people employed in wildlife farms, and it was a $70 billion industry." Then on February 24, 2020, right when the outbreak in Wuhan was winding down, the Chinese government "put out a declaration saying that they were going to stop the farming of wildlife for food," says Daszak.
The farms were then shut down. "They sent out instructions to the farmers about how to safely dispose of the animals -- to bury, kill or burn them -- in a way that didn't spread disease." Daszak thinks the government did this because these farms could be where the coronavirus jumped from a bat into another animal and then into people. During WHO's mission to China, NPR reports that "Daszak said the team found new evidence that these farms were supplying vendors at the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan, where an early outbreak of COVID occurred."
Sure... (Score:2, Insightful)
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WHO keeps parroting stuff that contradicts my biases. No reason to believe them.
Re:Sure... (Score:4, Interesting)
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WHO put actual boots on the ground to investigate. I give them a lot more credit than some random on Slashdot whose only hypothesis is "omg Jina!"
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You mean when they showed up a literal year after the outbreak? Too funny.
And what? If you want to make some accusation that China created some huge coverup by moving the wet market, destroying historical records, or something go ahead, but in the meantime we often find out many things about cases such as this *years* later both from research, documentation, and field visits long after the fact.
It's not like they are going around Wuhan asking a bunch of Chinese "hey do you remember a year ago..." and relying on some feeble human memory.
Please learn how incident investigation work
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What exactly is your argument?
Of course WHO would want China to believe it was wildlife farms rather than that it escaped WIV. One of only a couple dozen biosafety level 4 [wikipedia.org] facilities on the planet, one of only two in China, housing the world's largest collection of bat coronaviruses, with a particular emphasis on discovering and researching those which target the ACE2 receptor [plos.org] (including COVID-19's closest-known wild relative), and whose research involved using CRISPR to edit mice to have the ACE2 receptor
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There's no proof that the virus escaped from the lab. But there is proof that the lab was trying to build a virus exactly like COVID-19.
Re:Sure... (Score:5, Insightful)
But it remains the most logical conclusion.
No, the most logical conclusion is to not reach a conclusion. You suspend belief. It would only make sense to jump to a speculative conclusion if we needed a conclusion in order to act. But the origin of the virus is not pertinent to our response to it, so it does not make sense to arrive at a conclusion when we lack adequate evidence for that belief to be justified.
Whether it came from these animal farms or it came from the lab or it came from elsewhere, we have learned the same thing: 1) Take greater precautions to prevent future pandemics. I don't think anyone is going to claim that the Chinese government is somewhat responsible due to their lax safety regulations and their general attitude that they can just fix mistakes after the fact (they're doing the same thing when it comes to pollution), but assigning blame should be less important than promoting changes that will prevent this from happening in the future.
When the Americas were first discovered, the initial explorers brought back syphilis. Since these explorers were Italians and Spaniards, it alternatively became known as the "Italian disease" and the "Spanish disease." It was even narrowed down to the "Venetian disease" at one point. One Italian, unhappy with this development, took great pains to redefine it as the "French disease," and due to a general distaste of the French, especially among the English, the name stuck. Meanwhile, syphilis continued to ravage Europe and killed millions until penicillin came along. The blame game didn't help anyone.
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"During interactions with scientists at the WIV laboratory, they noted the new lab has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory,” states the Jan. 19, 2018, cable, which was drafted by two officials from the embassy’s environment, science and health sections who met with the WIV scientists. (The State Department declined to comment on this and
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There is only One China!
Do you know who also claims there is only one China? The Republic of China. On Taiwan. Except they claim it for themselves. They also claim all the offshore territories and the disputed borders that the PRC claims.
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They're both wrong. Independence for Hong Kong! Free Tibet!
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Actually given the safety procedures in a BSL-4 lab it is actually far more logical that it did in fact come from the markets. for it to escape a BSL 4 lab it would require a large serious of people, process and technical failures. important to remember the lab is there precisely because that is the area these virus's traditionally appear.
I can see you have never worked in the lab business - and don't know anybody that does.
All kinds of rules get routinely violated in labs. The academics are often too arrogant to think the rules apply to them, or too absent-minded to remember the rules, and the lower level staff are too poorly paid (and often poorly treated) and hence willing to cut corners. Then you get the problem of people who got their jobs because they knew somebody - and aren't competent to do the job once they get it. Big problem,
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Oh, really? [umn.edu]
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You seem to continue having a problem with numbers.
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"Of course WHO would want China to believe it was wildlife farms rather than that it escaped WIV."
You have an interesting and insightful post here, but just wondering: Did you mean to say the reverse? Wouldn't *China* want the WHO to believe is was wildlife farms and not a lab accident that started the whole thing?
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"the "Chinese virus" crowd drumming up racist acts against Asian people"
Nobody is trying to "drum up racist acts against Asian people". My wife is Asian, so, yeah, kind of personal here. In saner times this would be the Wuhan virus since that's where it was first noticed. There's nothing "racist" about that. China planted the whole "it's racist!" canard because they were domestically claiming that the virus was created in a lab in the US and planted there by US Marines during a joint military exercise.
h [japantimes.co.jp]
Um... the argument is that experts say (Score:4, Informative)
Also that epidemiologists have been warning about those farms (and the markets that go with them) for over a decade, meaning it's completely expected that we'd get a pandemic out of them?
Never mind that the Chinese lab nonsense is coming exclusively from right wing talking points, who are desperate to get Trump and the GOP off the hook for their lousy response to the pandemic, a response that was inevitable since the entire theme of the Republican party is "let the free market decide, gov't should do as little as possible" even though that's a demonstrably terrible idea in the case of a global pandemic?
And let's just say it did come out of a lab? Where did it come from BEFORE it was in a lab? Do you think China engineered it? Do you know so little about genetics that you don't understand that a genetically engineered virus would have markers indicating that, markers that are clearly absent in the case of COVID?
And if it came from the wild, well, what bloody difference does it make? At best we upped the time table a few months?
But again, the important thing is we're distracting from the idea that Governments should take positive action to help their citizens. The right wing spent 40 years telling us "Government is the problem, not the solution". They're not about to let a little thing like half a million dead Americans make all that work go to waste.
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Google gain of function virus research using animal passage techniques. For a decent summary https://www.newsweek.com/contr... [newsweek.com]
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Other than several Chinese researchers, that is.
Re:Sure... (Score:5, Insightful)
And COVID-19 "just happened to" break out right in their backyard, in a form
The problem with that line of thinking is that the cause-effect relationship goes the other way around: Why did we have a BSL4 facility housing bat coronaviruses that target the ACE2 receptor in China? Well, because we predicted that bat coronaviruses were crossing over into to humans in China [google.com]. They were doing that kind of research there because they are trying to replicate in a lab what is happening in nature so we could understand how it happens and prevent it.
Just for fun: Imagine that there is a place on earth where there are lots of earthquakes. The government wants to study earthquakes to better predict them and build more earthquake-proof buildings. So they naturally build the research lab in that earthquake-prone area so that they can take measurements. The lab creating small earthquakes in the lab to understand how they work. Then one day there is a particularly large earthquake in that area. And suspiciously, it is the exact same kind of earthquake that the lab was researching! Conclusion: It must be that the lab caused the earthquake! No. Most likely, that the area that experienced natural earthquakes, just experienced another natural earthquake.
So it is with China. It could well be that the virus escaped from this lab: but the presence of the lab is not in any way evidence that the lab created it. This is why circumstantial evidence is so dangerous.
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Bless your heart, you believe in a benign China.
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There's bats everywhere.
Ultimately, this is a judgement call. At this point, we have no way to know if it originated in the lab or not. The burden of proof here needs to be higher than "a lab there exists to research this, ergo it came from the lab." But given how closed China is on these things I suspect we will never know. Either way, the prudent thing to do is to increase controls at that lab just to be safe.
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was already highly adept at spreading directly from person to person.
And yet, we see in the UK and the US where it has been spreading for some time, that new variants emerge that are even MORE adept at spreading? Did you ever consider that, as many disease experts have pointed out, mutations happen? Mutations that increase its ability to spread means it out-competes other strains that aren't as good. As I understand it, the disease was around long before it blew up in December. That means it probably had plenty of time to spread through the
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Please link to any comment whatsoever that has suggested that GOD dunnit. Unlike ID, humans can actually tinker with viruses.
Check my posting history if you think I'm not on the heathen side of the religious divide.
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Except the fact that disease outbreaks occur pretty much on the regular (sadly): https://www.who.int/csr/don/ar... [who.int]
We just don't hear a lot about them because most are pretty isolated.. like MERS-COVID, and SARS, and Avian Flu (all various strains of coronavirus, which is one of the most common viruses).. These are all respiratory infections (which are highly adept at spreading since its airborne). https://www.medicalnewstoday.c... [medicalnewstoday.com]. Viruses much like this one have been responsible for many of the most destr
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I can't ever see them pinpointing the exact start point. Here is an example.. Corona Virus in Italy 2018 [independent.co.uk]
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probably the most likely explanation.
89% of statistics are made-up on the spot.
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You mean the hypothesis (Score:4, Insightful)
What you're doing is trying to put the blame on China's government instead of where it belongs: Good 'ole capitalism.
China wanted the money from unsafe farms and markets, farms experts have been warning them for well over a decade are unsafe because when you get a lot of different and wild animals together in close quarters you get rapidly mutating viruses.
But you don't care about facts. As long as you're winning. As long as you can feel that shitty internet high that comes from repeating carefully crafted talking points given to you by billionaires that you know work because they've been focus group tested by professionals to push people's buttons.
You're side's winning. Meanwhile we're running out of processors because Taiwan's in a major drought. Congratulations and enjoy it while you can.
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On the one hand we have zero evidence and only some very wild and dubious speculation that it came from a lab. On the other we have the WHO investigation, with evidence that will duly be published, and the opinion of independent experts saying it is likely from a farm.
I think that qualifies as "debunked".
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It's funny, you're terrified of winning (Score:2, Troll)
Somewhere in the back of you're mind you're terrified of what's about to happen. It's bloody hilarious to watch.
As a right wing troll you're required to reply to my every post though. For engagement's sake you can never let an
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Just like your comment is to divert attention from the disasterous response to the pandemic by the Trump administration.
The US has similar rates to similar countries in Europe. Was that also the fault of Trump? Is everything always Trump's fault all the time for you? The good news is that Orange Man Bad syndrome is curable, it just requires less emotive though processes.
it is still the president's job to deal with the problem.
Actually, some of it is at the federal level, which Trump handled ok, eg border control, Vaccination mobilisation efforts, funding and access to military relief resources etc. Most of the other responsibility is at the state level, but I'm sure that is someho
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1. It's not a bioweapon: The disasterously incompetent response is Trump's fault. 2. It is a bioweapon: Let's bomb the shit out of China and the horrible response is Trump's fault, and now he's guilty of treason for is disasterously incompetent response to what he knew was a bioweapon, and in the process allowed a foreign nation to kill hundreds of thousands more people in our country than would have been killed had he actually acted like it was a bioweapon rather than just saying
Re:Sure... (Score:5, Insightful)
Here are some things a competent president would have done.
1. Not lied about the severity of the virus. Not tell people it would disappear like a miracle. Not tell people that it was no worse than the flu.
2. Not politicized public health measures like mask wearing.
3. Not disregarded his own government's public health orders.
4. Not turned the whitehouse into a superspreader by having multple events with lots of people where mask wearing was ridiculed
Just to name a few off the top of my head.
You don't need to be an infectious disease expert to have a better response than that. All you have to be is not incpompetent.
Also your facts are totally wrong. Democrat states do not have higher death rates. They are basically the same everywhere (despite blue states being more populous). We don't have a lower death rate than sweden. The US has 1,622 vs sweden's 1,278 per million people.
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Not politicized public health measures like mask wearing.
Lol, feel free to show the medical literature that demonstrates the net positive effect of mandatory mask use.
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But you are asking for medical literature that demonstrates that a regulation is effective. That's at best on the fringes of the field of medicine. It's more in the realm of social science (i.e. a soft science). "Will mask mandates (if followed) lead to positive effects?" (a medical and scientific question), and "Wi
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Acting like a cunt doesn't make you any more right, you know.
Trump fucked up, a lot, and a lot of people who didn't need to die did as a result of his fuck-ups. Deal with it.
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What is the foreign country most comparable to the U.S.? Canada. And Canada has a death rate about a third of that of the U.S. [592 vs 1649 deaths per million]. State and local governments simply can't do as much as needed because of the massive amount of interstate movement of people.
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The "inhabited" part of Canada is just as tightly packed with people as the "inhabited" part of the USA:
https://brilliantmaps.com/half... [brilliantmaps.com]
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Look for the press conference where he sets a good example by wearing one.
Oh, wait... there isn't one.
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No actually a US President doesn't control the entire nation's response. He can do some high level things like close borders (which he was criticized for) or negotiate things like vaccine stocks (which he was criticized for) but a lot of policy in America is up to more local leaders who can tell him to f off.
You left out one thing he absolutely did: Play it the fuck down and criticize, scapegoat and suppress anyone who expressed any concern over it. Sure he couldn't single-handedly wipe it away, as you say, because he isn't God. But he, personally, certainly made sure that the nation suffered so he could position himself better for an election. Expressing it any other way is simply delusional. That narcissistic asshole wouldn't wear a mask until over 125,000 Americans died. We are all better off not having a pr
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I guess you forgot when Dems were literally calling everybody racist who wanted to be careful about the virus. And 'Its just the flu bro'.
OMG that just simply excuses literally everything Trump did (and didn't) do last year... right? Right? Get off it.
Re: Sure... (Score:2)
Yeah, sure. Trump has nothing to do with wild conspiracy theories about the wuflu. He would never do that to you.
Re:Sure... (Score:5, Interesting)
While everyone agrees that bats were the original enzootic reservoir, scientists by in large don't subscribe to the idea it was released from WIV, either deliberately or accidentally. That's a story being promoted by politicians. There's no evidence to support that idea at all, and while it can't be completely ruled out, scientists seem to think the virus coming from WIV is unlikely.
Nobody is saying that the virus definitely passed through intermediary host species, but it's plausible given what we know about SARS-COV-2's close relatives, notably SARS-COV-1. Wildlife suppliers are a logical place to look given the early cluster found at the Huanan Seafood Market. It would explain why there was just one large early cluster in Wuhan, not many. Wuhan is enormous; if the prefectural city were in the US it would be the largest city in the country, both by area and population. WIV and Huanan are roughly the same distance apart as Battery Park at the tip of Manhattan and Yankee Stadium in the Bronx. Surely the hapless case zero would have spread the virus to other people places on his way there.
We really can't rule out anything at this point because we don't really know how long the virus was circulating in humans. A lot of conspiracy theories implicitly assume that the virus entered just before the Huanan cases occurred, but for all we know the virus has been circulating among people for years before it gained it an aggressive mutation.
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The point is we'll never know for sure how/where it started because the CCP has lied from the very beginning and refused to allow any credible investigation. So, clearly Trump's fault.
Re:Sure... (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, it's not his *fault*, but he didn't help by pulling the plug on US-China scientific cooperation. That cut off our back channels for information. Generally politicizing the pandemic didn't help either.
Re: Sure... (Score:2)
Your evidence for that scenario? How do you distinguish between cover-up and ignorance? Because the U.S. hasn't figured out where it came from either. Was there an American cover-up? Why are Chinese scientists so special that only their scientific methods can unravel this mystery?
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No one will be able to figure out where it came from without unfettered access to Wuhan, the lab and patient records. Who said anything about Chinese scientists? The ones who have spoken up against the CCP script have been disappeared. That's the whole point. We will NEVER know now, it's too late. Nothing the WHO or the CCP says will be believed because of how they acted.
But look over there! Trump!!!!
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Surely the hapless case zero would have spread the virus to other people places on his way there.
I have no idea either way, but purely from a logical point of view, isn't it an option that 'hapless case zero' drove directly there, thereby not interacting with any other people in the interim? We're talking a 15 minute drive right?
Re: Sure... (Score:3)
Interestimg (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Interestimg (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you also suspicious of the fact that volcanic eruptions seem to frequently occur near volcano monitoring stations? Are those dastardly volcanologists causing volcanic eruptions? No, of course not - the volcano monitoring stations are in places where volcanic activity is likely, because that's exactly what they're trying to study.
Similarly, the Wuhan Institute of Virology is a hub for coronavirus research because it's relatively close to the bat populations where coronaviruses are prevalent in nature. It's of course impossible to prove the negative that the virus didn't somehow escape from there, but the coincidence on its own isn't very compelling evidence in favor of the theory.
Re:Interestimg (Score:4, Insightful)
It's actually not close at all. The reason that the WIV is in Wuhan is that Wuhan is a megacity, bigger than New York City. It wouldn't be surprising to find an institute of virology in New York City, because NYC is chock full of stuff like hospitals, universities and the like.
The connection between WIV an bats is pretty typical for an academic institution: there was a researcher there who got really interested in bat zoonososes before anyone else did, and that attracted like-minded researchers.
The same reason you're likely to see something like emerge in a place like Wuhan is related to its sheer size and extensive intra- and inter-regional commerce connections.
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These experts think its 90% more likely it came from the lab than the WHO hypothesis. Considering the WHO has not been shown any original data or been given access to the most vital people and locations by china I tend to agree with them. The theory that this virus jumped from animal to animal to humans and this just happened to occur down the street from the only lab in all of china that both studies corona virus and engages in Gain of Function experiments is a bit of a hard pill to swallow.
https://www.nytimes.com/intera... [nytimes.com]
Ohio State university would chose disagree: https://www.newscientist.com/t... [newscientist.com]
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Maybe China was trying to weaponize this virus and it stupidly escaped that research center next to the meat market.
Really mods? This is the first sentence of this post and you mod it up?
If China was trying to weaponize a virus, they could create something that kills people at a much higher rate. Coronaviruses are not exactly the ideal candidates for biological warfare. In a world with Ebola they're going to try to make a cold that is particularly deadly for old people, smokers, and individuals living in densely populated areas with lots of air pollution. . .if they were trying to create a biological weapon to attack the
If China tried to weaponize a virus (Score:2)
Experts have been warning about the farms and wet markets for decades.
Farms & wet markets are a *much* simpler answer. Occam's razor applies. Fewer presuppositions.
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Interesting, and it makes sense (Score:3)
The way it spread at the Danish mink farms, and the way other viruses have jumped species like the swine and avian influenzas... apparently there's a now not-so-hidden cost to raising other critters for food, fur, and fun.
Still, since starvation is a real threat in many parts of the world, it seems unlikely to end suddenly.
Re:Interesting, and it makes sense (Score:4, Interesting)
In the aftermath of the H5N1 bird flu outbreak, I remember there being unsubstantiated reports that suggested that one year an area in China had a particularly cold winter. Farmers who would normally have their animals left outside actually brought domesticated chickens in to their homes to help the animals survive the unusually cold temperatures. With humans and fowl living in such close proximity during the cold spell, the researches postulated that H5N1 had managed to jump the species barrier.
If that hypothesis is correct, then we’re not just talking about the farming of what you and I might consider to be ‘wild animals’ as a means to help a people out of poverty, what we’re looking at is perhaps also a case of less-than-safe farming practices. I think it is important that I stress that I’m not suggesting malpractice or attempts at hiding the truth. Rather, I think that what we’ve seen with H5N1 and perhaps Covid-19 is that strains of virus are far more adaptable and resilient than we might have thought.
Just as we’re now seeing cases of new Covid-19 variants in humans, as the virus begins to adapt it’s RNA to better favor a human host, so we’re also seeing the evolution of non-human infections adapt to actually be able to thrive in humans.
A bit like a traditional ‘whodunit’ where the detective tells us about “Method, Motive and Opportunity”, a virus also needs these things. The motive is obvious - the drive to propagate the species through reproduction which is a fundamental property of life. The method is the ability to jump a species barrier, to adapt and evolve into newer and perhaps more advanced life forms. The opportunities present themselves when a small virus sample is presented with a new potential host. And as we’re learning, the virus can replicate in such staggering numbers and with such a short period of time that one tiny genetic change in a generation can soon lead to very different infection rates.
Sometimes this sort of evolution is relatively benign (if you want an interesting example, read up on the “Lenski Affair” and Dr. Richard Lenski’s research in to e.Coli bacteria that evolve to be able to consume citrate. Other times, as with Covid, it seems as though the evolutionary change has more dramatic consequences for us...
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If that hypothesis is correct, then we’re not just talking about the farming of what you and I might consider to be ‘wild animals’ as a means to help a people out of poverty, what we’re looking at is perhaps also a case of less-than-safe farming practices. I think it is important that I stress that I’m not suggesting malpractice or attempts at hiding the truth.
I don't pretend to know the the financial status of these Chinese chicken farmers who had to board their hens with them to keep them alive, but I strongly suspect their livelihood may have depended on it. I say that to say this: even if you'd been able to properly express the dangers of zoonotic transmission across species barriers to them, the real chance of financial ruin, perhaps undernourishment and starvation, might have weighed in more heavily in their decision-making process. Less-than-safe might be
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It's a problem in many countries of the world. In rural Central America (for example) you can find signs telling people to not let their farm animals inside, because it is a vector for disease.
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apparently there's a now not-so-hidden cost to raising other critters for food, fur, and fun.
This has actually been true since people began farming animals. In fact, a disproportionate number of viruses throughout history have cropped up in Chinese pig and chicken farms and then spread via the silk road. It has to do with large farms and population density.
However, the diseases that came from Eurasian animal farming also made the survivors particularly resilient. This is why, when Europeans started exploring the Americas, the diseases they brought spread like wildfire and killed off large swaths of
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It's also rather weird that they'd shut down all the farms.
Wildlife farms are just farms, and people having been raising livestock for millenia. Just apply appropriate controls, and keep going!
how many contagious diseases (Score:2, Interesting)
How many contagious diseases could we avoid if everyone were vegetarian? Swine flu, bird flu, COVID-19, ebola, maybe salmonella would never had spread as wide if it weren't for industrial scale chicken farms.
If you want to keep eating fried chicken and BBQ ribs, you better kept your damn mask on for another year. If you can convince everyone to be vegetarian, maybe we can avoid having a few more of these economically devestating pandemics in our lifetime.
Re:how many contagious diseases (Score:5, Insightful)
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Give me one example of a great civilization that only herded animals around.
Re: how many contagious diseases (Score:3)
You'll get sick from living on carrots (Score:2)
but not from overdosing on vitamin A. Carrots don't have vitamin A in them. They have beta carotene, not vitamin A. Your body turns beta carotene into vitamin A as needed.
https://consumer.healthday.com... [healthday.com]
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Salmonella, E. coli, and Listeria can all be spread via and vegetables.
Due to bad hygiene and being poorly cooked. I know in the West, especially in the US, there's a cult around raw food, but seriously - wash and cook the food properly.
Also, the biggest crops are the cereals, and they pretty much can't be eaten unless thoroughly prepared that gets rid of any bacteria.
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How many contagious diseases could we avoid if everyone were vegetarian?
I mean we may not have a virus, but is it really "living" when you're not eating a 1lb 49 day dry aged tomahawk with a demi-glass sauce?
how many vegetable diseases (Score:3)
This is assuming there are no diseases spread via fruits and vegetables.
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us should bill them now (Score:3)
us should bill them now
Doesn't pass the stink test (Score:4, Interesting)
"They take exotic animals, like civets, porcupines, pangolins, raccoon dogs and bamboo rats, and they breed them in captivity,"
the Chinese government "put out a declaration saying that they were going to stop the farming of wildlife for food,"
None of these species are particularly efficient for being farmed for food. Particularly pangolin, which are ant and termite eaters. They are sensitive to habitat loss, since their food source is so specific. Some of the others are solitary and don't adapt well to being kept in high population densities. The Chinese would be better off farming traditional livestock species for food. Like pigs and chickens, where the farming experience base is pretty well established. I suspect that these species were being farmed, but for traditional medicine. Not food.
One more thing:
Daszak thinks the government did this because these farms could be where the coronavirus jumped from a bat into another animal and then into people.
So then we should have seen the first Covid outbreaks in and around these farms. It doesn't seem that this is so.
Re:Doesn't pass the stink test (Score:4, Informative)
You don't understand China. These animals aren't meant to be STAPLE food. They are meant to be eaten as exotic food items whose price per pound is much more than e.g. pork or chicken. Snake meat e.g. would go for $20/pound rather than $2/pound pork. Bamboo rat which are about the size of a guinea pig is the same way. You can actually watch videos on youtube of these farmers who were raising these animals. Many of them were becoming "stars" in China's social media.
Re:Doesn't pass the stink test (Score:4, Insightful)
Probably. Just like coronavirus got into western wildlife farms where we raise animals for decoration.
It wouldn't be at all surprising for some farm worker infections to go unnoticed. Many people show no symptoms at all, and the ones that do are almost all pneumonia, which is super common.
COVID might have gotten caught in Wuhan *because* they had a coronavirus lab there. If a weird pneumonia showed up in the US it might well be caught sooner if it was in Atlanta or Maryland and some local medic could call up a golfing buddy at the CDC or NIAID and say "hey Joe, had some weird cases, you might be interested in this."
Re: (Score:2)
So then we should have seen the first Covid outbreaks in and around these farms. It doesn't seem that this is so.
They probably have enough other less deadly coronaviruses jumping over. The farmers may have developed antibodies that protected them from covid19.
Hurry Up. (Score:2)
Well? Don't keep me in suspense. Tell us WHO it is.
Wuhan is celebrating (Score:2, Troll)
Wuhan has long since recovered from the world's first outbreak of Covid-19. It is now being remembered not as a disaster but as a victory, and with an insistence that the virus came from somewhere - anywhere - but here. [bbc.com]
The tidbit I cannot find in English to link to, is that they celebrated their "victory" with a giant — 20 meters in diameter — pie, stuffed with bat meat:
Re: (Score:2)
It's not creepy, throughout history most people have eaten the animals available to them. The creepy thing is getting your food in a sterilized store without ever knowing where it came from.
Re: (Score:2)
Thank you for intentionally misrepresenting the general consensus of comments here. As you are surely aware, few if any comments have said the virus was "designed". What the comments actually suggested is that the virus was found in nature, studied at a Wuhan laboratory, and accidentally escaped from the lab due to poor security practices. So why are you bringing up the strawman of intelligent design?
Re: (Score:2)
I suggest you not bury your head in the sand.