zlacker

>>todd8+(OP)
it's not xenophobic, but xenophobic people really love to talk about it. that's the problem with the discourse.

of course the irony is that it doesn't even matter. We already know China (1) tried to cover it up, screwing the rest of the world, and (2) has poor wet market sanitation practices that seem designed to cultivate these kinds of diseases. Those issues are already bad enough.

>>metall+dl
> has poor wet market sanitation practices

Honest question: Is that a fair/accurate generalization to make? If Hell's kitchen episodes and accounts from food industry workers are any indication, sanitation practices in food handling establishments elsewhere are not necessarily always stellar either. And surely China has some equivalent of WholeFoods?

One ought to be careful not to attribute a characteristic differently depending on whether they belong to the class of people in question[0]. If it turns out that reality is that some chinese establishments have poor sanitation practices just like some US establishments do, and it just so happens that they got unlucky (perhaps partially due to not-so-directly-related aspects like zoning law differences or propensity for higher bat populations due to local fauna/flora ecosystems), the us-vs-them blaming game doesn't necessarily have as strong legs to stand on.

[0] https://xkcd.com/385/

>>lhorie+jr
They aren't equivalent, and it's not even solely a factor of sanitation. You are keeping tons of live animals in cages in close proximity to each other and tons of people. Stress is extremely effective at weakening immune response, which makes it easier for pathogens to replicate, jump hosts, and jump species. Now the pathogen is an a different environment, which begins to force adaptation, which is to say the pathogens that mutate in beneficial ways to their new environment begin to outcompete the rest. And this just keeps happening. And happening. And happening. And with new strains of disease brought in from pathogen reservoirs in the wild.

There's only so much good sanitation processes could even achieve here, in the same way there's only so much that bad sanitation processes at a restaurant can do. Bad sanitation in a restaurant almost always means an increase in known pathogens that we can either take care of fairly easily, or even in the worst case scenarios of something such as botulism, have limited ability to spread among the general population.

The risk of an unsanitized kitchen is just totally different from that of even a somewhat sanitized wet market.