Wet Markets need to be stopped NOW forever.

Bird-flu, SARS, MERS and Covid-19 all originated in wet markets.

Once a ‘local’ practice starts killing thousands or millions of citizens around the planet then it becomes everyone else’s business. This pandemic will kill many, make millions poorly, many will potentially lose their jobs and homes and trillions of pounds has already been wiped off the global economies because of it. Coronavirus has had a personal effect on almost everyone on the planet to some degree or another and action is needed to prevent such a thing happening once again.

I respect people’s culture but these places have proven too many times now that they are rampant environments for producing viruses. I am not sure if it is the types of animals and wildlife that get mixed together or the contamination of live and dead animals or the free flowing blood splatter from slaughtering on site….but something about these places breeds perfect conditions to pass bacteria to humans in the form of respertory disease.

Live-animal markets provide a source of vertebrate and invertebrate animals for customers in tropical and subtropical regions of the world. Wet markets sell live poultry, fish, reptiles, wildlife, dogs, cats, snakes, bats, rats and mammals of every kind. Live-poultry markets (mostly chicken, pigeon, quail, ducks, geese, and a wide range of exotic wild-caught and farm-raised fowl) are sometimes separated from stalls selling fish or red-meat animals, but the stalls can be also be with no physical separation. Despite the widespread availability of affordable refrigeration, many Asian people prefer live animals for fresh produce. Wet markets are widespread in Asian countries and in countries where Asian people have migrated.

We simply cannot afford to sit back and not do anything – they cannot continue as they are because evidence says it’s not working too well. Maybe the health and safety needs to be significantly improved, maybe education is needed to alert stall holders to the evils of cross contamination of differing species….but to save any further outbreaks I would prefer them to be put in the past. Asia is not the rural, cycling population it used to be. The days of it being isolated and cut off with communist state restriction are long gone.

Looking forward to when this pandemic eventually dies out and the world gets its freedom back, then what? Will we forget this and simply all go back to ordering trillions of dollars of product into their economies? Part of me thinks that is exactly what will happen. The rest of the world has allowed the region to almost solely be the industrial superpower with manufacturing giants exploiting cheap, mass workforce to produce almost all our goods.

Regardless of covid-19 I have long believed wet markets are despicable places, inhumane conditions even for the live animals caged awaiting their slaughter but when you see the mix of species; it is a smorgasbord of risk potential which must end.

The world needs to speak before placing more Asian orders.