People of China, please step up and protest the government to stop the sale of wild animals such as this to prevent future outbreaks and protect humanity from animal-borne illnesses.
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.