The virus propagation was said to have started in a market that sells, among other products, snakes.
2019-nCoV can go from bats to snakes to humans. Eating snakes or bats seems like a bad idea.
2019-nCoV can go from bats to snakes to humans. Eating snakes or bats seems like a bad idea.
When you cook something, it tends to kill the virus and germs. Or at least makes it safer to consume. But, you can still get sick from the fluidic contact, like getting salmonella from handling raw chicken.
Let’s take a look at some scientific evidence.
Ebola was theorized to come from bat feces, that might have fallen on a toy, and a girl put it into her mouth. She didn’t eat the bat. (This is only a theory, as they don’t know the true origin.)
The MERS virus from the Middle East, was thought to come from sick camel. I haven’t heard of the locals there eating camel, so it must have transmitted via fluidic contact. (Again, this is only a theory, as they don’t know the true origin.)
SARS was theorized to come from bats as the carrier, but the vector was a civet. Maybe the infected fluids of the civet jumped to humans. (And again, this is only a theory, as they really don’t know the true origin.)
This 2019-nCoV is again thought to come from bats, but the vector is currently unknown.
So with all that, I think perhaps, a bat was a carrier, and got some other animal sick, which became the vector. And when they slaughtered the sick animal, the infected fluid must’ve infected a worker, who got sick. And this worker might’ve infected an old person, who has a weaker immune system, and got sick, who then transmitted it to others, and got them sick, and now we have a full-blown pandemic.
So, the true cause here, might not be that people ate the wild animal, but that the humans came into contact with infected fluids from wild animals. And the presence of bats and wild animals, at this Wuhan market, just increased the probability that an outbreak like this could happen.
As a thought experiment, in Texas, there are a bunch of bats in Austin. What if one of these bats are also a carrier of some disease, and they fly over a nearby chicken farm, and poops on the chicken, which gets the chickens sick. The chickens are now the vector. And now, these sick chickens are handled by humans, and the above scenario plays out in Texas. And then, a pandemic spreads out from Texas. Would you think that Americans are disgusting for consuming chickens here, if this theoretical scenario were to happen?
The US poultry industry is so bad at looking after their animals they have to wash carcasses in chlorine to even _approach_ safe levels of pathogens like salmonella and campylobacter.
Is that not also a possible source of infection?
//edit// A slightly similar case from the UK: https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2008/oct/17/footandmouth-rura...