What If They Don’t?

In an op-ed in the Washington Post Jared Diamond and Nathan Wolfe explain why China is particularly conducive to producing new illnesses:

The jump of SARS to humans occurred in wild animal markets in China. Throughout China, there are many such markets, where wild animals that have been killed or captured are sold, dead or alive, for food and other purposes. SARS came from marketed civets, small carnivores that in turn had contracted SARS from bats.

Wild animal markets exist in other countries besides China. But Chinese markets are especially efficient for launching epidemics because China has the world’s largest human population and is increasingly connected by cars, planes and high-speed trains.

These facts about the animal origins of emerging human diseases, and about the ideal transmission opportunities offered by Chinese wild animal markets, have been familiar to public health workers for many years. When SARS emerged from the markets in 2004, that should have been a wake-up call to China to permanently close the markets. But they remained open.

When a novel coronavirus surfaced in the city of Wuhan in December 2019, public health officials quickly suspected that it came from a wild animal market there. That hasn’t been proved yet, but everything points to wild animals and their trade as the source.

The Chinese government reacted initially by playing down the outbreak’s significance. But then Beijing reacted forcefully, establishing systems to limit transmission on a scale the world has never seen before. The policy appears to have helped dramatically. China also sought to prevent the emergence of more zoonoses by finally closing the wild animal markets and putting a permanent end to the trade in wild animals for food.

That’s the good news. But there’s also bad news. The government has not banned the other major route of human/wild-animal contact in China: the trade in live animals for the purposes of traditional medicine. This trade encompasses many animal species and is patronized by enormous numbers of people. For instance, the scales of small ant-eating mammals called pangolins are used by the ton in traditional Chinese medicine, because they are thought to combat fevers, skin infections and venereal diseases.

For Western observers, the solution seems obvious. How could the all-powerful Chinese government, capable of locking down millions of people within days, not prohibit the wild animal trade completely? But wild animal products represent more than a mere delicacy for many Chinese — using them is a fundamental cultural practice. But the global threat from coronaviruses is too great. China and other governments around the world must act quickly and decisively to end the wild animal trade.

We have fundamental cultural practices, too, and one of them is a reluctance to tolerate other countries’ practices spreading diseases to our population.

We can’t influence the behavior of the Chinese government. That is beyond our ability. We can, however, change our own behavior and one way we can do that is to place everyone who comes to the United States from abroad in quarantine to ensure they’re not bringing an unwanted guest along with them. We can, in effect, quarantine ourselves. We would also need to secure our borders, a political hot button issue.

Or we can accept the risk of the disease that kills tens or hundreds of millions becoming our least desired import.