Poor hygiene, animals kept in stressful conditions and traders and customers packed together can easily result in a virus jumping from an animal into a human
WHEN ANTHONY FAUCI, a well-respected immunologist on President Donald Trump’s coronavirus task-force, called for the worldwide banning of wet markets last month, he may have had in mind somewhere like Tomohon in Indonesia. The highland town is surrounded by lush countryside in northern Sulawesi, home to the Minahasa people and an amazing diversity of wildlife.
Mankind has fought several bitter battles against virulent enemies that emerged from live wild animals in wet markets, although such diseases’ exact sources are often murky. One of the most recent was SARS, another coronavirus that spread around the globe in 2003, which was believed to have been passed to locals through bats, via civets sold for meat in a marketplace in Guangdong, also in China.
Wet markets come in many forms. They encompass both Tomohon and, for example, Chun Yeung Street in Hong Kong, which must adhere to stringent health guidelines and where the only live goods available are aquatic . Closing down wet markets would have wider implications. A study of 350 such markets in Nanjing, an urban area of 8m people in eastern China, found that they accounted for 80% of the city’s vegetable sales. Across the whole country it has been estimated that such places handle 73% of all the fresh vegetables and meat that is bought. In contrast, the study found that supermarkets tended to be where Nanjing’s households went to buy processed food.
Previous suggestions, made earlier this year by the WHO, to allow live-animal markets to continue have already created outrage, not least from Australia’s prime minister, who claimed to be “totally puzzled” by the idea. Plenty of people will continue to call for outright closures. A lot of non-Westerners view this as cultural deafness. “Chinese prefer to buy their food fresh—living. Western culture is more about frozen food,” says Simon Lee, of the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
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