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Comment by tanilama | Hacker News Reader

This.

But seriously, you can't stop individual eating weird stuff.

This might be more like a cultural issue. Somehow some people still believe eating wild exotic animal strengthen their body.

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Eating isn't the issue, and it's not the "exotic" animals that are generally the issue. It's the widespread exposure to large populations of animals that act as reservoirs for these viruses (where they can run through many, many generations very quickly and spread once a variant that is transmissible to humans pops up)

I would argue it is the eating that creates a market and incentive for such encounter to happen in the first place.

The previous Coronavirus (SARS) to come out of China was traced back to wild bats (that were not being sold in markets). It remains to be determined where 2019-nCoV originated.

Most of the diseases that come out of China and spread to any great extent are avian or swine flus, which originate in chickens and pigs on massive, largely unregulated, farms.

I think when you compare the scale and scope of SARS with the WNV, I think there should be slightly less finger pointing. The US, North America and Europe are not immune to sharing their viruses globally. Lets not pretend 'the west' has the problem of virus control sorted. It starting there less often because there are less wild and animals around.

Oh absolutely. I don't necessarily agree with the top level comment (or at least I think it's incomplete, as you've described).

Worse, a double digit chunk of population in China not only doesn't believe in Western medicine, but Western medical science as such, like really not believing in microbes...

Unlike the popular notion, it's not only the "cultural revolution generation" of 60+ people. The amount of weird people believing in all kinds of cults, antivaxing, and trying treating cancers with yoga and unicorn poo peak in people in their forties.

China is a picture of society where the type of loonies like "new agers" have won. TCM now gets peddled from Chinese state TV, just like a certain yoga practice was 20 years ago.

When it will pass the boiling point, I feel TCM peddlers will get steamrolled just like them, but that's not gonna happen while Xi is standing in for it. Yes, Xi believes in TCM

TCM, I assume, means Traditional Chinese Medicine.

I am not surprised that traditional Chinese medicine gets advertised in China.

I would be very surprised if they started advertising traditional Indian medicine there though.

The thing is it has never been in that position to begin with. Out of hand quackery is a relatively new phenomenon.

Even just 20 years ago, "TCM" was still considered something only lunatical old people do.

But then China opened, and new wave of weird novelties deluged the society: "new age" cults, antivaxers, hipsters, gurus, psychodelics, psychics, antiscience and other stuff like that.

The contemporary brand of quackery has gotten into mainland China from... Hongkong out of all places.

Back in times when just anything Honkongese was considered super cool in the mainland, quack pharmacies that were treated like jokes in HK somehow managed to slip in, and became the new fascination of Chinese nouveau riche, and a token sign for their "sophistication"

And then over the time, it turned to out into what it is now, now being believed in quite seriously

Nitpick but the capitalisation is important. TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine) is not just traditional medicine from China, it was a concerted state effort by Mao to modernise and standardise it, drawing from various local and traditional methods. Notably it was developed to create standard cultural identity and also notably, he did not use it himself.

Ayurveda and TCM are actually extremely similar in theory.

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