Who Is To Blame

[fruitsalad]

For this virus, where do these viruses start, and shouldn't something me done to make sure nothing like this happens again.

[10ClarionSt]

Revenge on the West, from the East, with love!

[Maydup]

The disease appears to have originated from a Wuhan seafood market where wild animals, including marmots, birds, rabbits, bats and snakes, are traded illegally. Coronaviruses are known to jump from animals to humans, so it’s thought that the first people infected with the disease – a group primarily made up of stallholders from the seafood market – contracted it from contact with animals.

The hunt for the animal source of Covid-19 is still unknown, although there are some strong contendors. A team of virologists at the Wuhan Institute for Virology released a detailed paper showing that the new coronaviruses' genetic makeup is 96 per cent identical to that of a coronavirus found in bats, while an as-yet unpublished study argues that genetic sequences of coronavirus in pangolins are 99 per cent similar to the human virus.

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/china-coronavirus

[ichkeria]

You can’t “make sure“ it won’t happen again.

[ichkeria]

Not a”seafood” market but a “wet market” - ie for the sake of live animals.
China has banned the consumption of wild animals since the outbreak I believe but difficult to enforce I’d have thought.

[ichkeria]

“Sale”
:-)

[Maydup]

Thats the concern. How can we enforce it in the more remote villages in China?

[alavahalf]

Wuhan isn't quite a village .. popultion 11 million.

[Gromit]

Viruses have been around for millennia. The first flu epidemic was in 6000BC.
They usually occur in other animals, pigs, cattle, birds or in the case of Covid-19, bats.
When we started to domesticate animals, we started to to get the same diseases from the animals.
Viruses constantly mutate. Covid-19 is just a new variation on another virus.
They are naturally occurring, so impossible to stop, and we will get another pandemic in the future.

[Gromit]

When Europeans first went to the America's, the native population had no immunity to European diseases like flu and smallpox. It reduced the pre-contact population of the New World as a whole by 90 percent or more. One says the population of central Mexico was reduced from 25 million in 1519 to 3 million by 1568 and only 750,000 by the early 1600s, 3 percent of the pre-conquest total.

[Peter Pedant]

where there is an animal infection - then there is blame
well this is AB

animals in the jungle not surprisingly have their own infections and every now and then, they find their way into another species

bat rabies which is a chronic infection ( carrier ) may be the source of rabies in man ( dead)
Marburg virus and Ebola
or bacteria - black rats have fleas which harbour [lague and these may jump onto a man and cause er plague
or fungus - if a cat or dog has ringworn the child in the family always will ...

so the short answer is - -- you cant ( stop it from happening again)

[cassa333]

The Chinese government has decreed that wild animals are a natural resource and can be used (food etc) and some of those animals are big game animals.

This virus originated in bats but jumped into another animal the name of which eludes me at the moment but it’s a bit like an anteater.

It then jumped into humans and first became apparent in the wet market in Wuhan.

If I remember rightly there was another such pandemic that originated in a similar way in China in 09. Was it SARS?

It will happen again and again because as soon the threat has diminished they start the wet markets up again and add more wild animals to the list.

[Old_Geezer]

God is to blame. They created evolution.

[cassa333]

Ah but OG, Perhaps Darwin is to blame for it and not god!!!

[albaqwerty]

cassa, are you thinking of pangolins? x

[bookbinder]

The Chinese media are trying to blame Italy for causing the virus outbreak:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8150589/Chinese-state-media-suggests-coronavirus-pandemic-originated-Italy.html
The Chinese authorities have also blamed the USA.

[ichkeria]

They may be right?

[Gromit]

cassa333

SARS wasn’t a pandemic.
You specify eating wild animals from wet markets which is wrong and misleading. We get these viruses mainly from domesticated animals such as pigs, chickens and Cattle.
And we do not get the diseases from eating them, it is transmitted respiratory, that is airborne, by breathing the same air as the animals we are close to.

[rowanwitch]

Sometimes it is better to stop thinking about blame and concentrate on finding a solution. I find the idea of the Chinese eating rare or endangered wild animals awful but it has been their cultural practice for centuries. To them it is normal and not in any way wrong. We do not have the moral high ground we are looking at a situation from different cultural positions.