zlacker

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.

>>cthalu+(OP)
I've been to "fish markets" in Germany that kept live animals (mostly poultry and rabbits) in cages in close proximity to each other and tons of people. Just because it's uncommon or illegal in the US doesn't mean it's exotic or unusual in the rest of the world. We only freak out about "wet markets" because 1) the name sounds gross (but it's catchier than "perishable goods street market", I guess) and 2) orientalism.

>>hnbad+F1
If the wet markets in china were just poultry and rabbits, it would not be an issue. We have a good understanding of the potential zoonotic diseases from those vectors.

We - including China - do not have a good understanding of the potential zoonotic diseases from the large variety of wild game that is captured and sold in these markets.