Zoonotic Diseases - the China Connection

What is it about Chinese markets that seems to unleash viruses on mankind? SARS, bird-flu, now COVID-19. No, this isn’t China-bashing. Spillover, David Quammen’s awesome book on inter-species disease transfer, looks into this question in the spirit of genuine curiosity. He cites a (true) point:

“Southern Chinese have always noshed more widely through the animal kingdom than virtually any other peoples on earth.”

 

Quammen then cites major changes in those “wet markets” (animals for eating are alive in the market, killed only when you buy) between 1993 and 2003:

1. The volume of wild-animal trade had increased enormously;
2. Cross-border trade of animals with Southeast Asian countries had shot up;
3. Commercial breeders had sprung up for species like snakes, civets etc.

You can see where this is going. Like all such places across the developing/poor world, wet markets cram these animals in tiny spaces. Crates, one on top of the other. And remember, the animals are alive, which “allowed wastes from one animal to rain down onto another”. Blood, urine, sweat… you get the picture:

“The markets (thus) provide a conducive environment for animal diseases to jump hosts and spread to humans.”

 

We humans hate uncertainty. We have to know. If we can’t know, we just jump to conclusions. In case of the SARS epidemic of 2003 too, a culprit species had to be identified. And this mindset leads to certain outcomes.

 

Bigger species are easier to test. And so it came to be that the civet looked like it might be the origin of SARS. Why? Because it was tested and found to have the virus that caused SARS. In a less panic-stricken time, Quammen says scientists would be allowed to consider the possibility that the civet might be like humans: not the cause, but a victim of the same virus. But hey, when the world wants a cause, which government can stand up to that pressure and bad publicity? And so the Chinese government ordered a mass-culling of the civet. Much later, it turned out that:

“Horseshoe bats are a reservoir, if not the reservoir, of SARS-CoV.”

The world’s collective reaction?

“Woops, civets aren’t the reservoir of SARS. Never mind.”

 

Now you see why bats were called the reservoir for the ongoing COVID-19 epidemic. Sure, it might be true, or it might be the civet story all over again.

 

To end this blog, a reminder of something we Indians bristle at, being considered homogenous by the West. The same applies for the Chinese, as this line shows:

“People in south China will eat everything that flies in the sky, except an aeroplane.”

Who said that? A northerner Chinese…