SARS and animal slaughter

[Guest guest]

from the New York Times:

 

THE RISE OF A VIRUS

>From China's Provinces, a Crafty Germ Spreads

By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL

 

 

HUNDE, China - An hour south of Guangzhou, the Dongyuan animal market presents

endless opportunities for an emerging germ. In hundreds of cramped stalls that

stink of blood and guts, wholesale food vendors tend to veritable zoos that

will grace Guangdong Province's tables: snakes, chickens, cats, turtles,

badgers, frogs. And, in summer, sometimes rats, too.

 

They are all stacked in cages one on top of another - which in turn serve as

seats, card tables and dining quarters for the poor migrants who work there. On

a recent morning, near stall 17, there were beheaded snakes, disemboweled frogs

and feathers flying as a half-alive headless bird was plunked into a basket.

 

If you were a corona virus, like the one that causes severe acute respiratory

syndrome, known as SARS, it would be easy to move from animals to humans in the

kitchens and food stalls of Guangdong, a province notorious for exotic cuisine

prepared with freshly killed beasts.

 

Indeed, preliminary studies of early SARS victims here in Guangdong have found

that an unusually high percentage were in the catering profession - a

tantalizing clue, perhaps, to how a germ that genetically most resembles

chicken and rodent viruses has gained the ability to infect thousands of

humans.

 

One of the earliest cases, last December, was a seller of snakes and birds here

who died at Shunde's First People's Hospital of severe pneumonia. His wife and

a several members of the hospital staff contracted it as well, setting off an

outbreak that now sounds eerily familiar.

 

"Oh yes, I heard that a guy here died of that pneumonia," said Li Songyu, a

40-year-old wearing a neat tan blouse, as she filleted live frogs and dumped

them into a basket. "But it is very safe and sanitary now."

 

Around the same time in December, Huang Xinchu, a chef, was admitted to the

Heyuan People's Hospital, 100 miles to the north, ultimately infecting eight

doctors there. On Jan. 2, another desperately ill chef was hospitalized in the

city of Zhongshan, south of Shunde, setting off an outbreak.

 

But if such early outbreaks present scientific hints about the origin of SARS,

they also provide painful political lessons in how a disease that has spread

worldwide could have been prevented.