Covid 19, bird flu, etc – why China?
The recent coronavirus now has an official name, Covid 19, and the death toll at present is a little under 2000, considerably more than that for the SARS coronavirus of 2003. It has spread to at least two dozen countries according to ABC reporting. I note that the WHO are emphasising how co-operative the Chinese authorities have been, I suspect as an attempt to keep those channels of communication and co-operation open, or to open them wider. The infamously over-controlling Beijing government is faced with a dilemma as its economy is taking a major hit – it desperately wants to get over this epidemic, which means downplaying it as much as possible, but its dependence on international trade means having to co-operate with those over whom it has no control. The Middle Kingdom has always been sensitive about this issue of control and dominance, which clashes with the co-operative spirit of modern global trade relations.
Having said that, Chinese authorities have certainly learned from the reaction to their fairly disastrous early handling of the SARS coronavirus outbreak in 2002. In terms of the really essential stuff, co-operation and information-sharing have rapidly improved – motivated by the apolitical spirit of research, detection and problem-solving that constitutes science’s unique value.
Of course, one of the questions being asked, with Covid 19, the SARS virus, and other viruses such as H7N9 avian influenza virus (which had a very high mortality rate), is ‘Why China?’ An article from late 2017 in the Smithsonian magazine provides a plausible if shocking answer.
It seems imprinted in Chinese culture that freshly killed-birds and other animals are tastier and somehow healthier than anything frozen or otherwise processed. The Chinese government has, in the past, been reluctant to interfere with the demand for freshly slaughtered produce, and it’s likely that, even if it enforced a clamp-down, the market would go underground. Melinda Liu, author of the Smithsonian article, described the scene at one of these markets, in the Sichuan city of Chingzhou:
Half a dozen forlorn ducks, legs tied, lay on a tiled and blood-spattered floor, alongside dozens of caged chickens. Stalls overflowed with graphic evidence of the morning’s brisk trade: boiled bird carcasses, bloodied cleavers, clumps of feathers, poultry organs. Open vats bubbled with a dark oleaginous resin used to remove feathers. Poultry cages were draped with the pelts of freshly skinned rabbits. (“Rabbit meat wholesale,” a sign said). These areas – often poorly ventilated, with multiple species jammed together – create ideal conditions for spreading disease through shared water utensils or airborne droplets of blood and other secretions.
Flu viruses can crop up and mutate anywhere – for example, the H5N2 flu strain which broke out in the USA in 2015 led to the slaughter of 48 million poultry – but China’s mixed farming habits, in which poultry and other livestock live in close proximity with their keepers, together with the taste for freshly slaughtered and disturbingly exotic meat, and the conditions in many markets and slaughter-yards, presents a massive cultural problem for China’s huge and increasingly mobile population. The country will have to come to terms with these issues, sooner rather than later, if it wants to recapture and grow beyond the leading economic role it led before the advent of Covid 19.
References
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/china-ground-zero-future-pandemic-180965213/
https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019
https://www.who.int/influenza/human_animal_interface/influenza_h7n9/en/
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