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Time to Ban Wet Markets

spectator.us

161–170 of 222 posts

Re: Time to Ban Wet Markets

#161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mad cow could hardly be called a pandemic. A whopping 231 total cases. It caused a little economic damage and comparatively no human damage.

A lot of economic damage, over 4.4 million cows were slaughtered [1] [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-45906585

Comparatively small. Estimates are that cost about $5.7b USD over the course of 5 years[0]. Conservative estimates are that it's going to cost $2.7t USD, and that was from before it was labeled a pandemic. [1]

[0] https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/publications/37404/11780_ld... [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2020-coronavirus-pandemic...

Re: Time to Ban Wet Markets

#162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is a direct consequence of their agricultural practices It's also a result of people, around the world (but mostly in China), buying into Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). It creates a market for products based on wild animals like bats and pangolins, which this virus originated from.

It is utterly bizarre to believe that eating different animal flesh will provide some sort of unique medicinal properties. It’s all pretty much muscle or fat tissue which is all very similar between wildly different organisms. Animals aren’t like plants or fungi which make a huge library of secondary metabolite compounds that do work as medicine. Like all archaic belief systems, let us hope that with enough time the…

With the amount of people who believes vaccines cause autism, pardon me for being pessimistic..

but don't confound my pessimism with giving up, I sincerely hope we'll gain the upper hand, but it will require a lot of work to get there.

Re: Time to Ban Wet Markets

#163
post #34

I think it’s a disgrace that the Chinese government hasn’t apologized for 1.) keeping wet market open 2.) silencing whistleblower doctor that would have stopped a pandemic 3.) letting 5 million people leave Wuhan 4.) pressuring WHO to not recommend border shutdown against China - Conjecture 5.) silencing whistleblowers inside China and around the world 6.) at one point, was surfacing propagandas that the virus didn’t…

(6) is a direct response to the White House's continued use of 'Wuhan virus', 'Kung Flu' and other racist/shitty deflection garbage. I'm not defending it, but it isn't happening in a vacuum.

No, (6) is a direct attempt to distract from the Chinese government's own screw-ups and defuse the outrage it caused within their own population. It was originally aimed at their domestic audience and appeared in the Chinese-language state press and social media before they started spreading the same conspiracy theory in the West.

Re: Time to Ban Wet Markets

#164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just point out MERS originated in the middle east. And then there is also Australia’s 1994 Hendra virus outbreak where corona viruses made the jump from flying foxes to horses. People working with the infected horses fell ill and two died. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henipavirus#Hendra_virus Also human to human orthohantavirus in South America. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andes_orthohantavirus So it's not just Ch…

And not just wet markets.

Yes. Hendra Virus was acquired by horses grazing under trees that flying foxes hang out in. That seems nothing like a wet market.

Re: Time to Ban Wet Markets

#165
post #34

I think it’s a disgrace that the Chinese government hasn’t apologized for 1.) keeping wet market open 2.) silencing whistleblower doctor that would have stopped a pandemic 3.) letting 5 million people leave Wuhan 4.) pressuring WHO to not recommend border shutdown against China - Conjecture 5.) silencing whistleblowers inside China and around the world 6.) at one point, was surfacing propagandas that the virus didn’t…

(6) is a direct response to the White House's continued use of 'Wuhan virus', 'Kung Flu' and other racist/shitty deflection garbage. I'm not defending it, but it isn't happening in a vacuum.

It's more likely that the CCP is responding to a more general allegation of Coronavirus-related racism against Chinese people (e.g. stereotypes about Chinese people as a race and/or culture being universally unsanitary) than specifically to the use of "Wuhan virus" (which is accurate) or "Kung Flu" (which is little more than a silly pun, though I'm partial to "Fluhan" myself).

Re: Time to Ban Wet Markets

#166
post #50

I remember when I was small, I accompanied my mom to a wet market, and saw a frog butchered in front of my eyes (chopped into two horizontal cut), and that gave me chills till this day that I actually don't eat frog meat. I do other stuffs though and have no problem handling knife for meat work. On the other hand, wet market like Tokyo's Tsukiji is very fresh and clean. Actually, wet markets through Japan are usually…

the issue isn't seafood (living or dead) its live mammals and birds. Tsujiki doesn't sell any mammals/birds and the vast majority of what is sold there is long dead, so its fine. The issue is when you have lots of bats/pigs/birds/etc in close proximity.

Right, I think that makes sense.

Re: Time to Ban Wet Markets

#167
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have been telling their own people source of the virus is the US: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/13/world/asia/coronavirus-ch...

One under director of the Foreign Affairs office posted it on Twitter, a site blocked in China. By this logic, the US is also telling their own people that the virus is a biological weapon because one senator said it on Fox News.

"Mr. Zhao’s remarks were spread on China’s most prominent social media platform, Weibo, under a hashtag: #ZhaoLijianPostedFiveTweetsinaRowQuestioningAmerica. By late afternoon on Friday, that hashtag had been viewed more than 160 million times, along with screenshots of the original Twitter posts."

Re: Time to Ban Wet Markets

#168
post #84

I remember when I was small, I accompanied my mom to a wet market, and saw a frog butchered in front of my eyes (chopped into two horizontal cut), and that gave me chills till this day that I actually don't eat frog meat. I do other stuffs though and have no problem handling knife for meat work. On the other hand, wet market like Tokyo's Tsukiji is very fresh and clean. Actually, wet markets through Japan are usually…

I don't know about Japan specifically but in the Caribbeans we'd often ship shrimps and other seafood in carbonic ice ("dry ice" in layman terms, turns solid below −56.4 °C (−69.5 °F). It has the added benefit of leaving no residue. I noticed as a child that there's little to no smell when using this. Afaik (1990s), it's just more expensive (and possible frostbites without gloves iirc), so we don't use it when normal…

Yeah I think that makes sense. A lot of wet seafood market in South East Asia doesn't have that luxury so it is really just fresh catch from the sea.

Re: Time to Ban Wet Markets

#169
post #12

I agree with the general aims of the article, but I doubt that the demand that the author makes - that China closes its wet markets - will be practically doable. With a billion people that have no reason to trust their government, it's going to be hard to convince them to drop what they and their families had learned with blood during the Mao-era famines.

China's leadership can relocate half a million people when they want to build a dam. They will be able to crack down on wet markets. The current pandemic should be the last one happening in a non-war setting. I can write this here from home in Europe and it will end up on a disk somewhere in the US within 13ms, we should be able to prevent man-made pandemics.

Authoritarian regimes have less control over their populace than you imagine. The War on Drugs is a laughable failure the whole world over, and China is no exception. If something as unsavory as drugs, which are easily condemned, are able to survive and continue, even under the CCP, how successful will a law against wet markets be, when the populace is in favor of it?

The issue with authoritarianism in this case, is that a fear of looking bad; weak, or ineffectual, caused mid-level party leaders to try and hide the reality of the situation, with disastrous results. (That Trumpism has lead the US in the same, disastrous direction is shameful. I don't know enough about the cause in Italy to comment about the failures there.)

It's funny you should bring up the Five Eyes intelligence alliance (assuming that's what your Europe-US ping time is referring to). We had knowledge of "an unknown virus" as early as November. That no one paid attention to it is a human failing, not a technology issue.

Re: Time to Ban Wet Markets

#170
post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One under director of the Foreign Affairs office posted it on Twitter, a site blocked in China. By this logic, the US is also telling their own people that the virus is a biological weapon because one senator said it on Fox News.

"Mr. Zhao’s remarks were spread on China’s most prominent social media platform, Weibo, under a hashtag: #ZhaoLijianPostedFiveTweetsinaRowQuestioningAmerica. By late afternoon on Friday, that hashtag had been viewed more than 160 million times, along with screenshots of the original Twitter posts."

Do you find the US government responsible for a conspiracy theory being popular on social media?
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