Pangolins found to carry viruses related to Covid-19
bbc.com
bbc.com
Remember that girl who paid 6.5 million dollars to get into Stanford last year? Her dad's listed company sells billions of dollars of TCM every year that claims to cure thrombus because the ingredients used (earthworm, scorpion and leech) are adept at digging things. Yes TCMs don't need to go through any FDA-like process or trial to prove anything, coz it's national treasure.
Pangolin meat and scales are prized in TCM coz you know, it dig rocks.
regards, your friendly neighbourhood abbreviation hater.
The worst ones are the unsanitary wet markets in the middle of dense urban areas, getting rid of those is the first step.
Meanwhile Xi Jinping is still promoting Chinese medicine in conjunction with standard medicine, even during the pandemic.
The wildlife “ban” that China enacted conveniently doesn’t include medicine, only for food consumption. There’s little chance the animals being brought into the country legally won’t have their meat sold on the blackmarket, just so they can get some scales or individual organs.
You're thinking China from 50 years ago. There are at least 4.4 million millionaires in China! More than in the US
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/oct/21/china-overt...
EDIT: sorry, I've misread the title, looking at the actual report https://www.credit-suisse.com/media/assets/corporate/docs/ab... it seems that US still has (well, had in 2019) way more millionaires - 18 million. It's only in top 10% wealthiest people that China overtook US
Still, 4 million people eating pangolins would provide enough opportunities for interesting zoonotic jumps
If only a subset of them were the ones buying the millions of trafficked Pangolins and civets and whatever else carries CoV, then that’d be great progress as a starting point.
Then for the wealthy you can make it a big social stigma to purchase them, especially after it brought the worlds economy to a halt... instead of doing the complete opposite where authorities are promoting it. Chinese authorities are well versed in influencing social stigmas and public shaming, which is a big deal in a country where ‘saving face’ often outranks reality.
After that you could focus on culling the wild populations that often get released in atypical habitats as a side-effect of poaching http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20161006-pangolins-are-the-wo...
Couldn't Beyond Meat create a pretty close facsimile to pangolin or bat or snake or whatever? Obviously this wouldn't eliminate 100% of demand. Particularly among those eating the animals for their magical properties, instead of their taste. But even if artificial versions of exotic meats could cut consumption by 20-30%, the corresponding risk of zoonotic virus transmission should fall linearly along with that.
And it's not that exotic meats are all delicious so people prize them, what flavor do shark fins/cubilose have? It's the supposed power they got.
- what one can read in 30 seconds takes 5 minutes to watch because people read much faster than they talk.
-The relevant 5 minutes of video will usually be embedded in a 20 minute video somewhere in the middle.
- The url says nothing about the trustworthiness ofthe source so you have to go out of band to establish credibility. Add to this YouTube is literally where every crank ever uses for sources as if 17 lunatics quoting each other makes them collectively more credible.
Basically a YouTube video is an invitation to waste 20 minutes of your life
Consider spending a few minutes summerizing the the video including what is established and by whom and why they are a credible source.
That way readers can distinguish between you and a million cranks.
My message was only a recommendation, I don't see why I should try to summarize an already well-crafted explanation.
[1] E.g., https://metro.co.uk/2020/02/17/coronavirus-start-chinese-lab...
The evidence currently implicates a virus that jumped from pangolins to bats and then bats to humans (EDIT: bats to pangolins and then pangolins to humans [1]).
Understanding that transmission mechanism is crucial to reducing the odds of it happening again.
[1] https://www.cell.com/pb-assets/journals/research/current-bio...
The theory being, bats are natures reservoir of the parent virus, and SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2 both descended from it, through an intermediate host.
You’re correct [1]. Thank you.
[1] https://www.cell.com/pb-assets/journals/research/current-bio...
Exotic animals in wet markets are not consumed by the majority of the population; this is mostly driven by the Chinese rich. The industry has survived creating its first pandemic due to its lobbying power; let's see how it rides out the second one.
> The discovery of multiple lineages of pangolin coronavirus and their similarity to SARS-CoV-2 suggests that pangolins should be considered as possible hosts in the emergence of novel coronaviruses and should be removed from wet markets to prevent zoonotic transmission.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2169-0
Edit: To clarify, these viruses have approximately 90% identity but in the (oft-suspected and brought up) ACE2-binding spike protein there is a ~97% sequence identity.
> In particular, SARS-CoV-2 exhibits very high sequence similarity to the Guangdong pangolin coronaviruses in the receptor-binding domain (RBD; 97.4%) ... Indeed, the Guangdong pangolin coronaviruses and SARS-CoV-2 possess identical amino acids at the five critical residues of the RBD.
There is another preprint that details more about betacoronavirus recombination.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.10.942748v1....
It's almost certainly the product of a recombination event between a pangolin and bat betacoronavirus, since recombination aggressively involves the spike protein in betacoronaviruses. Since we already have a bat virus with high identity (96%) and now a spike protein with very high identity (97%), both in the same phylogenetic tree with origins to SARS-CoV-2, it's reasonably to assume that this is the product of natural recombinant evolution.
Now, it might be the case that it's guided evolution in a Wuhan lab somewhere, but I don't really buy it. Nature is staggeringly good at producing new and innovating viruses, and I believe we will soon find more closely related ancestors to this virus.
We also know that China has previously had several terrifying biocontainment failures with virus labs. Things got out, including coronaviruses, but were stopped before spreading far and wide.
By the way, the very original conspiracy theory was eventually proven correct. Calling it a conspiracy theory was a great way to mock people who were pointing out the truth.
The first case IDed by the Lancet had no exposure to the seafood market, but many later cases did (pg 499):
https://www.thelancet.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0140-6736%2820...
A decent preprint from the US looking at the genetic origins:
http://virological.org/t/the-proximal-origin-of-sars-cov-2/3...
> It is improbable that SARS-CoV-2 emerged through laboratory manipulation of an existing SARS-related coronavirus. As noted above, the RBD of SARS-CoV-2 is optimized for human ACE2 receptor binding with an efficient binding solution different to that which would have been predicted. Further, if genetic manipulation had been performed, one would expect that one of the several reverse genetic systems available for betacoronaviruses would have been used. However, this is not the case as the genetic data shows that SARS-CoV-2 is not derived from any previously used virus backbone17. Instead, we propose two scenarios that can plausibly explain the origin of SARS-CoV-2: (i) natural selection in a non-human animal host prior to zoonotic transfer, and (ii) natural selection in humans following zoonotic transfer. We also discuss whether selection during passage in culture could have given rise to the same observed features.
[0]: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/8/chimps-humans...
For context: The entire SARS-COV-2 genome is 29,811 nucleotides long. The human genome is around 3 billion base pairs.
It is one page long, not peer reviewed, and says "96% or 89% identical". If I were a journalist, I think I would at least want to have an expert review the citations for those numbers, and the evidence that this particular virus was present at those labs.
Humans and chimpanzees also share 96% of the same DNA – that's not as similar as it sounds.
The virologists there are very active publishers, and by all accounts among the very best in their field. And now they're pissed off. Here's a snippet from the institute's coronavirus lead, defending them from an onslaught of insane and stupid conspiracy theories:
> [Shi Zhengli] said on her social media account that she “guaranteed with her own life” that the outbreak had nothing to do with the lab but was a “nemesis for the barbaric habits and lifestyle of some people – like eating wild game including bats.”
Chinese researchers and doctors have generally been among those most willing to push back against the CCP's misinformation and censorship. Of all people, why in the FUCK would we want to muzzle these guys?
Why is that crazy? Unless you're suspecting the Chinese of designing a fairly dull viral weapon that they first released on their own people, I'm not sure why anyone would care to go through the doors.
Sweet jungle meat from a wet market is the likely source, as with many of these kinds of virii over the centuries.
It wouldn't have had to have been a deliberate release for SARS-CoV-2 to have come from there. Accidents happen, and there have been several accidental releases of the original SARS-CoV from Chinese labs. It's also not beyond the realm of possibilities that someone tasked with destroying animals that were research subjects decided to make a few extra yuan selling them to the wet market across the street instead.
I've never heard of any accidental escapes of SARS. Do you have a source for this claim?
> SARS has not re-emerged naturally, but there have been six escapes from virology labs: one each in Singapore and Taiwan, and four separate escapes at the same laboratory in Beijing.
https://thebulletin.org/2014/03/threatened-pandemics-and-lab...
Those accidents are fucking terrifying. I'm not sure whether to be more scared of that, or of wet markets and antibiotic-soaked factory swine/cattle/poultry farms. Humanity certainly isn't taking any of this seriously enough.
There are numerous reports of the wet market source not being the actual source. I've never said that the Chinese have released this virus on purpose, I did in fact imply though that the Chinese created this virus on purpose (how it got out in the wild is anybody's guess). Having countries creating bio-weapons in 2020 should be grounds for war, no matter if they release it or not.
Later edit: Now I saw that you said "dull viral weapon", what do you find so "dull" about a virus that has put the whole world economy on its knees in a matter of 4-5 weeks? Yes, it's not as gore-y as Ebola but it's an order of magnitude (at least) more effective in bringing us down as a species.
There is zero credible evidence that this virus was engineered in any way. What we do have is detailed genomic analysis done by actual virologists, comparing it with coronavirii from the vast pools in animal populations, that can trace its natural evolution [1]. This analysis and ongoing surveillance is how virologists and epidemiologists hope to predict future epidemics.
I don't think anyone suspects that it was a weapon. A totally non-selective weapon like this would be extremely stupid. But it still could have come from that lab, and such a theory should not be discarded for the time being.
>Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology released a new directive titled: “Instructions on strengthening biosecurity management in microbiology labs that handle advanced viruses like the novel coronavirus.” https://nypost.com/2020/02/22/dont-buy-chinas-story-the-coro...
shortly after.
Sure, if you think of it in terms of being a weapon, it's not an armageddon weapon, but very few madmen want those anyway.
https://cmr.asm.org/content/20/4/660.abstract
A paper from 2007.
Having visited many markets like this in Asia. I will not miss most of them as long as they are so unregulated/dirty.
https://www.cell.com/pb-assets/journals/research/current-bio...
It's less the species than the wet markets.
Putting lots of species in close proximity, particularly ones that don't naturally co-exist, facilitates host jumping. Its only comparison is with medieval European cities, where people, sewage and livestock had constant and close proximity to one another.
Live ones at that.
If the only animals we can eat are a small number of species from regulated farms, any crossover/issue is contained and traceable to those species and farms.
If you allow (including as a purchaser you create demand for it), in open market a wider range of species from a wider range of sources, you open up the number of attack vectors increasing risks to everybody on the planet.
* Still learning Mandarin.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/05/asia/china-coronavirus-wildli...
We simply do not have a choice - we're either going to have massive climate change and mass displacement, animal-borne viruses wiping out chunks of the population, fishless oceans by 2050, etc. We can't feed the population with animals anymore.
Note that I'm not arguing one way or the other, that's just how I've seen it play out a few times.
The vast majority of all food poisoning comes from greens. Not meat.
Plenty of folks die from Salmonella and E. Coli outbreaks
Edit: I re-read your comment and saw you were referring to food POISONING - but I'll still maintain my point here. Fact of the matter is, food poisoning is not contagious and is fairly rare, and there are machines in place for product recalls, etc. What we have at the moment is a global pandemic started by the close quarters of animals. Which one would you rather deal with?
And the reason it's more common to get salmonella or e-coli from plants is because they are eaten raw (lettuce or broccoli or carrots, etc); this doesn't mean meat isn't contaminated with it. It just gets "cooked off" because you heat meat (or pasteurize dairy).
Why is it absurd?
> is less likely to facilitate disease growth than growing romaine lettuce?
As I clearly stated I was discussing, as with the parent comment, the community of diseases that infect consumers is massively more prevalent in eating salads than meat. That's not an opinion.
You clearly want to have a different discussion
Man predicts spread of virus in animal species. What vision.
Don't raise livestock or breed/catch wild animals, and the contact between humans and animals drastically lowers. Then pandemics don't happen. If that market in Wuhan didn't exist, we wouldn't be having this conversation today.
> Your phrasing suggests that it's very obvious, yet you are blaming salads as the real public crisis in an earlier comment.
You are clearly in such haste to find fault that you don't actually read the things you are arguing with. You jumped in on a discussion, made yourself look like a loony deranged type and here you are doing it again in a non sequitur fashion
Take your daddy issue driven zealotry elsewhere and stop harassing people
For a very scientific community, you absolutely hit a brick wall as soon as you tell a typically unhealthy group of people that eating meat is a massive public health hazard.
ha.
I don't think you quite understand how China works.
As another comment [1] mentioned, the 2009 swine flu originated in Mexico [2].
The 1918 Spanish flu, on the other hand, originated in Kansas [3].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22694893
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_flu_pandemic#Mexico
[3] https://www.kshs.org/kansapedia/flu-epidemic-of-1918/17805
If you don't, then yes, animal farms in general need to be shut down. But they won't, because the world is addicted to eating meat, and pandemics will keep happening.
Speaking of which, I need to get back to work but I'll see ya in an identical comment section in four years where people will blame, oh I don't know, the eating of chinchillas or something.
[1] https://slate.com/technology/2013/10/traditional-chinese-med...
> A second cultural factor behind the epidemic are traditional Chinese beliefs about the powers of certain foods, which have encouraged some hazardous habits. There is, in particular, the aspect of Chinese eating culture known as “jinbu,” (進補) meaning, roughly, to fill the void. Some of its practices are folklorish or esoteric, but even among Chinese people who don’t follow them, the concept is pervasive.
What changed are the numbers.