Why do so many viruses originate in China?

[ohhkay]

Please explain why SARS, Coronavirus and Swine flu have all started in a similar area.

Is it because the country is very large? Is it due to the large population?

Or is it selection bias?

Many other countries are densely populated with poor living conditions. And wet markets are not solely confined to China.

I'm genuinely curious, not racist.

@sashh
Your thinking is misguided. Something like a bat would be a delicacy and would be sold, not eaten (although despite living in China for 12 years have never seen bats being sold or eaten).
These types of products are incredibly expensive, again an assumption on my part as never seen it for sale, but basing this on items such as shark fin soup which I have been served.
The video of the chinese lady ‘eating’ a bat is from a travel blog and not taken in China.

Because it's often when humans consume wildlife that has contracted the virus already. HIV, SARs, etc.

Current WHO advice on prevention etc just indicates to ensure meat is well cooked (which should kill the virus). All about food hygiene

(well, in part about food hygiene)

@Squigean
Despite your lack of confidence, self isolation is exactly what is happening in many cities in China. I only went out to go to the supermarket between 23rd and 28th January.

I just don't understand how someone can look at a bat and think, oh that might be nice for a snack

Well then you don’t understand the swathes of population in Asia, Africa, Oceania and, to a lesser extent, Soth America, that eat dozens of species of bat.

Hunger, poverty, freely available and a source of protein. And, yes, the bat soup delicacy is well publicised but let’s not forget that bat is widely available and eaten other than through the well publisecsed bat soup...

Agree every country has animal cruelty but China is on another level. Shark fin soup for example they have their fins cut off and are dumped back in the sea alive and left to very slowly drown. I was also emailed a petition which had a video included of a man clubbing a donkey to death in the street once it was unconscious he started cutting it up and selling the meat also dogs boiled alive and cats skinned alive sorry @wellhellooothere i am in no way a racist but i find animal cruelty bloody disgusting in any way shape or form and China is notorious for it

Your post was deleted Wickedwoo - I'm guessing for being racist...

@wellhellooothere racist 😂😂 it's called having an opinion. I feel very strongly about animal cruelty that does in no way whatsoever make me racist

The wet /wild markets are the main problem, and the animal cruelty is just off the scale

Hi everyone, please take note that we don't take racism or xenophobia lightly, and this is against our Talk Guidelines. Please report any posts to us that break our guidelines in this way. Thank you.

One of my oldest closest friends is Chinese when we were in school she went to visit grandparents in China and she was the one who made me aware of animal cruelty over there and she is an avid animal rights activist now who is thoroughly disgusted of the cruelty that goes on. I don't care for skin colour or ethnicity i care about the treatment of defenceless animals and that does not make me racist. I live in a very multicultural area and have friends from all different walks of life and i find it extremely offensive to me called a racist

Well, maybe check in with MNHQ and ask why they thought your post ( the xenophobic/racist one that made a weeping statement about an entire nation) needed deleting then. I'd be curious if I were you.

This is a good article on the virus and why they often originate from the Far East and how they spread.

www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/coronavirus-china-wuhan-what-symptoms-could-next-sars/

'Why do these diseases often emerge in China?
China is a populous country with a large number of animal markets - people are far more likely to come into close contact with live animals that harbour viruses than in the UK. '

And in the West we have a completely avoidable measles epidemic
because people listen to garbage on the internet
rather than doctors

The measles epidemic is indeed completely avoidable.

Same with the whooping cough which led to the completely avoidable deaths of babies.

Theres nothing like the FDA regulatory body in China, not quality control i terms of how meat is packaged, sold, and refrigerated. All these viruses originated from Wet Markets.

Viruses mutate and with close contact to farm animals and our encroachment of wild animal habitat we are exposed to more and more.
A connected world of air travel means pathogens move faster, infect more Varried humans learn/exchange information (like antibiotic resistance) with other bacteria/viruses.

Most of the time we are lucky and they don’t find humans a suitable host or mutate to a less dangerous version or need a intermediate host been (like the Hendra virus which needed horses between the original host Fruitbats and humans) or are actually helpful like the exposure of less dangerous Cowpox (start of the smallpox vaccine) meant you didn’t get smallpox.

Bats have an amazing immune system that can cope with most viruses (Marburg, Ebola, Hendra and Nipha and more) and they can go-exists with things that kill most other mammals.
We have moved into their habitat not the other way around.

You can be concerned about Novel coronavirus but also think about all the others like Antibiotic resistant T.B, other Hospital breed superbugs (Golden staph) and Super fungus like Candida, Aspergillus, and Cryptococcus (which kill over one million people each year worldwide) and are immune to all 3 types of Fungus-cides.
They didn’t have from China but everywhere that overuse fuguscides on plants and crops (so mainly the west) and
Candida auris is so impossible and tenacious that contaminated hospitals have had to close down to get rid of it.

@ShanghaiDiva - sorry wasn't clear in my post. I didn't mean people in China.

To elaborate I meant those told to quarantine themselves in counties where the rest of the population don't have to.

Because Bats eat a huge amount of insects including the ones that carry diseases like malaria that infect humans, make a huge amount of what we use as fertiliser, help fertilise a huge number of plants we need for food and you can’t just kill everything!

Three of the houses I have had had bats living in cellars or the roof. They are amazing creatures and no one ever got ill from them.

The potential loss of face if they do nothing is enormous

It seems to me that this is a key point, though it raises the question of the difference between actually doing something and merely appearing to do it for the sake of national pride

Given that China's a totalitarian communist state with a deeply questionable record when it comes to even human rights, I also wonder just what chance there is of animal welfare receiving attention any time soon