Blame Canada

Canada’s Bryan Adams is in hot water over a tweet he sent out blasting China’s wet markets. Given that the COVID-19 pandemic is believed to have started in a wet market in Wuhan, are they a public health problem?

Wet markets have been used in most urban societies at one time or another as a way of selling livestock for later consumption. If they are alive, you know they are fresh and can judge somewhat whether they diseased.

The alternative, a slaughterhouse, has taken over in most nations although wet markets can still be found. The advantage of a slaughterhouse is that you don’t have to kill the animals yourself – something that us city folk are squeamish about. This also avoids the issue of animal cruelty not to mention the logistical problems of transporting live animals through the city. Just let the government establish standards and you can forget about it.

Then we put another step between us and the animals – the butcher who cuts up the carcasses so that what we buy scarcely looks like an animal. By the time we see the meat, it is far removed from the animal it once was. Cooking it should remove any lingering pathogens.

Of course, the meat can be contaminated at any point along the processing chain, leading to recalls when people start getting sick. But we don’t get airborne or aerosol viruses from this process.

That’s not to say that people can’t get viruses from animals in a slaughterhouse or on a farm but the risk is lower. Farms aren’t in the middle of a big city, at least not often anymore, so the initial spread would be more limited or slower. And there are fewer people to infect in a slaughterhouse.

So it’s not really surprising that wet markets are implicated in more pandemics than slaughterhouses. A lot of diseases have spread from animals to humans through contact with live animals even without wet markets. Wet markets just give any disease a greater shot at crossing the species boundary.

Up till now, wet markets have been tolerated as a traditional practice. We’re not going to get rid of them overnight. However even non-vegans who oppose cruelty to animals must admit that keeping live animals in tiny cages surrounded by crowds of people is troubling.

The bigger issue however is that there are a lot of terrible livestock practices around the world that have significant health impacts.

• how we feed cattle has a major impact on their methane emissions, a significant greenhouse gas source.
• raising animals in crowded conditions is not only cruel, it also promotes the spread of diseases within those facilities, leading to an increased use of antibiotics. This is a large part of the spread of antibiotic resistance in bacterial infections.
• the use of antibiotics to promote rapid growth creates a similar problem.
• the way animals are transported from farms to slaughterhouses is cruel.
• slaughterhouses are frequently criticized for their inhumane and unsanitary methods.

I could go on but the basic point is that we need to make a lot of changes to our food supply. Blaming wet markets is correct for this particular pandemic but misses the broader picture that our Western practices are just as bad in the long run. We need to blame Canada, the United States and lots of other countries for our own failures to address major food issues.

Then there is food security. Our ongoing failures to deal with global food insecurity, including our own local food insecurity for large numbers of citizens,  should be a national scandal. With a rapidly expanding global population, the problems are going to get a lot worse very quickly. We’re not doing the kinds of planning to address them.

You might notice this post is a lot longer than Bryan Adams’ tweet but I’ve not even touched on the details of the problems that need to be addressed. That’s one reason why I don’t tweet. Real discussions can’t be held on twitter. As Bryan Adams has found, even trying to highlight a single issue can get you in a lot of trouble.

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NOTE: Adams also referred to the practice of eating (presumably live) bats. So far as I can tell, this is not a custom anywhere in the world. However that story has been circulating, incorrectly, that eating live bats was done in Wuhan, China. While eating other live animals is done around the world, I have found no instance of eating live mammals.

I suspect that story started as a rather ill-informed and possibly racist attempt to explain how the virus spread from bats to people since cooking a bat would destroy any virus it harbored. In fact, since bats breath and have saliva, a distressed bat, such as one in a cage in market with lots of people, would likely be spraying virus-laden aerosols all over the place (see main part of article). The virus probably was contracted from a live bat either in the market or while handling it later.

There is no evidence that Adams realized that the live-bat-eating story was, well, batty. – if that is what he was referring to. He likely simply didn’t fact-check that part of his tirade. Sadly he is far from the only person who is guilty of this failing, particularly when the “fact” enhances the impact of the point you are trying to make.

Or possibly he was simply referring to the particular animal that has been implicated in a few other cases of animal to human transmission. There is no safe way to eat animals however, so singling out bat-eating is not a defensible position.