It can be banned, sure, but I don't see the superstitious side of the consumption being curtailed.
When you have a market for rare 'natural wondercures' being sought out, it only takes one mutation in a virus to spread on from another mammal to humans, add to that China's population density. A recipe for disaster.
> When you have a market for rare 'natural wondercures' being sought out, it only takes one mutation in a virus to spread on from another mammal to humans, add to that China's population density. A recipe for disaster.
What if the government starts a massive propaganda campaign about quartz crystals, hot stones or some other abundant and innocuous miracle cure?
No more so than expecting westerners to be scared out of all the dangerous things we do.
Even to the extent that most of us don’t smoke or have lots of unprotected one night stands with strangers, there’s enough who do that they and their illnesses are still a major part of our health systems.
i have got to ask, i understand the sugar part, but the meat? Are you referring to the red meat or the fat in meat? Could you elaborate on the meat part?
It's not just that meat and sugar are unhealthy, but also that presence of meat and sugar correlate with absence of healthier foods, such as vegetables, legumes, seeds, fruits and nuts.
Referring to particular foods as "healthy" or "unhealthy" is reductionist and unscientific. All foods have both positive and negative effects. Certain meats are generally quite good, at least in moderation, particularly for getting high quality protein. Eating too many Brazil nuts can cause acute selenium poisoning.
Be more specific. If you want to convince anyone here then please cite high quality studies which actually meet evidence-based medicine criteria. All of the studies so far which claim to show meat is unhealthy were badly flawed observational studies which relied on subject reported data, lacked proper controls, and only showed very small effects.
There is still much scientific controversy and no real consensus. Much of what passes for nutrition "science" is basically junk. To be more specific, hardly any studies justify an "A" grade recommendation according to evidence-based medicine criteria.
There are many people who follow carnivore diets who seem quite healthy. It's ridiculous to assume that we know the right answer when so much research remains to be done.
As for sausage versus vegetables, you'll have to be more specific. Those are two very broad categories of food and the exact effects will vary tremendously depending on specific ingredients, cooking, the eater's genetics and microbiome, etc.
You know that dietary cholesterol has no relation to blood cholesterol levels, right? You know that the saturated fat myth--started by the sugar industry--was debunked, right?
If meat were really so obviously bad for you, then Inuit should be keeling over from atherosclerosis by their 30s or so. They don't.
(If you're unaware, the Inuit diet is very heavily meat-based; there just simply isn't a lot of opportunities for plants in the High Arctic. They're getting sufficient vitamin C from meat, which is actually moderately difficult!)
Isn't it interesting that meat provides all essential amino acids and fatty acids. And not some complex combination of various food groups like a vegan diet must include, just red meat. Meanwhile there are no essential carbohydrates.
In absence of a caloric surplus / chronic overfeeding, also known as energy poisoning, you have absolutely no proof for the claim. There isn't even an association, let alone causation.
And it would be naive to think that eliminating added sugar and meat would prevent people from eating too much.
Which actually beats dying of starvation, which is what people used to do ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ — comparing food with cigarettes or viruses is completely ridiculous.
In absence of guns being fired at people, guns are completely safe. There isn't even an association, let alone causation.
> And it would be naive to think that eliminating added sugar and meat would prevent people from eating too much.
I guess that people could still gorge themselves on potato chips, popcorn... Maybe a few other foods? But surely it's clear that 90%+ of overeating occurs with meat and sugar?
Comparing guns to food is also completely ridiculous.
FYI 100 grams of walnuts has 654 kcal, roughly equivalent to 350 grams of French fries, or... 400 grams of chicken breast, which also happens to have 124 grams of protein, which no natural vegan source can match. Or 650 grams of cod w/ 148 grams of protein.
Show me the people that got fat from eating boiled chicken breast or cod. Show me the studies that show any kind of association between lean meat and disease for that matter.
Also 500 grams of watermelon, which we can easily eat at a single meal has 150 kcal and about 6 teaspoons of sugar (fructose and sucrose).
Show me the people that got fat or sick from eating too much watermelon.
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100% of the people that got fat or sick also breathe air and walk around. Maybe they should stop breathing, no?
That's not a correlation unless you can show the variables are dependent.
Show me the studies showing dependence. I'll wait.
I have no idea which point you think I'm making. I'm certainly not claiming that boiled chicken breast is unhealthy. Cod is healthy, and not meat.
The point I'm trying to make is that it is a challenge to overeat on a diet that doesn't contain meat or (added) sugar.
And since overeating is a major cause of obesity, diabetes and heart disease, it's fair to say that meat and sugar are responsible. Without meat and (added) sugar, we would not have the current level of obesity in the west.
I'm specifically not claiming that meat or sugar is unsafe in any quantity.
How many people are killed by sleep-deprived driving? Is it a common knowledge? Are there social ads? How many people can be saved by increasing public transportation?
bilekas is probably thinking of the trade in things like poached ivory, rhino and tiger parts, where being banned on paper has not eliminated the black market.
Aside from the disease risk, remember that the Chinese appetite for wild animals as "traditional medicine" is contributing to the disappearance of entire species. Notable and well-publicized examples include tigers and rhinos, but there are many others.
Stupid shit like using rhinos horns and tiger genitals as aphrodisiacs are still widely held beliefs in parts of China. Xi Jinping's administration has actually been encouraging this nonsense, and in Fall of 2018 they proposed lifting restrictions on the trade and sale of endangered animal parts.
This tragedy has been extensively reported for my whole life. As a little kid I remember being brought to tears by accounts of the cruelty of Chinese traditional medicine, and the appetite of east Asian countries for exotic animals in general. Documentation is plentiful. Just an example, this Nat Geo article came in near the top of my search results just now:
and it's not just china. many other asian countries, such as vietnam, consume illegal animal parts for traditional medicine and enable the trade of such things in china. couple all of that with socioeconomic struggles in africa that creates a willingness and incentive to supply, and you have a problem that won't disappear until the animals disappear.
in half a century, poaching, human encroachment on habitats, and climate change will see many animals (rhinos, tigers, polar pears, certain orca populations, etc.) disappear. humans are not organized enough to stop this.
I can't see how this can be successfully enforced without a massive education campaign and actual enforcement by authorities, including moving the so-called "wet markets" (which are outdoor butchers that are very important to the food supply chain in many areas of China) into modern indoor facilities for improved food safety.
Older people in China (the so-called lost generation) are set in their ways: remember that in traditional Chinese medicine, the medicinal value of an animal is directly proportional to its rarity. This of course creates perverse incentives to kill the last living members of endangered animals already under threat from poachers.
China has plenty of laws including a constitution that defends practicing free speech and religion, but in reality laws mean nothing if there's no enforcement.
This very important. Both the PRC and USSR constitutions, on paper, arguably provide better freer basic law than that of the US but in practice it’s just words on paper.
However, also in practice the faction in power gets to capriciously enforce what it wants selectively, usually to solidify standing. So mr Xi and mr Stalin (née Jughashvili) get to purge all want-to-be usurpers.
> However, also in practice the faction in power gets to capriciously enforce what it wants selectively, usually to solidify standing.
aka as "the rule of law".
From a continental European perspective, the US stance in rule of law seems a bit dubious as well, with the president pardoning his friends, or the enormous sentences afflicted to people once, but only once, they end up in bad public standing, or elected states attorneys incentivize to look hard on crime to their constituents.
I'm not sure how your examples illustrate your point.
For instance the power to pardon is defined within the constitution with a singular exception added to it. It doesn't say a president can't pardon their friends. That might be socially unacceptable but it is a power delegated to the president nonetheless. If the constitution made no such mention of that power and the president was pardoning their friends - or indeed anyone at all - then that would be a good example of capricious use of power outside the rule of law.
To give an extreme counter-example, imagine you had a constitution that legally gives unlimited supreme powers to a single person (which has happened, e.g. Germany during the Nazi years).
I wouldn't describe that as the rule of law, but rather as despotism. I think you can have a constitutional system that has powers codified that still violate the goals and ideals of the rule of law, without being technically illegal. It's not a black and white thing.
While pardoning friends is certainly distasteful, that power is explicitly defined in the Constitution and is plenary. The only potential exception is a self-pardon.
There are plenty of examples of embarrassing pardons, but it's not a rule of law failing.
I believe the exception is impeachment. Articles of Impeachment can be brought against any civil official. There's nothing stopping Congress from impeaching and removing the Ambassador to China, a Supreme Court Justice, or pretty much anyone else operating under the authority of the federal government.
As recently as 2010, a district court judge was impeached, convicted, removed from office and barred for perjury.
Also, as far as I'm aware, it is within the power of the Presidency to pardon themselves. If by some chance someone were elected President who had previously been convicted of a federal crime, they can pardon themselves of that crime. In theory, they could even be in prison at the time of election! I would love to say that's unlikely in the extreme, but in 2015 I watched Joe Morrissey win re-election to the Virginia House of Delegates while serving a prison sentence: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-virginia-election-idU...
There are a couple of opinions that say charging a sitting president with a federal crime would be unconstitutional, but I don't believe they're technically legally binding, nor do I understand that it was ever been decided in court.
Self-pardon's have never been attempted, but I believe there's some dicta suggesting it would raise Constitutional issues (though it's true that it's not explicitly barred by the Constitution). There's a whole separate issue over whether or not you can actually charge a President, but it wouldn't prevent a President from being charged with a crime related to actions taken prior to assuming office (or the extreme case of a President who had been convicted prior to assuming office, although I think that may prevent running in the first place).
Impeachment isn't a criminal process. It's a political process that rests entirely within the Legislative branch. So it's not as much an exception as a wholly separate proceeding.
Law doesn't automatically hold, as long as it still require enforcement. Those sort of errors are kind of unavoidable. That is a program requires user input at every step and people do that.
The Executive having the power to pardon (or to refuse to prosecute) for crimes is meant as a check on legislative power to make life miserable through imposition of bad law.
Just throwing that check away seems a bit destabilizing.
I mean, I'm with you on the the American justice system being capricious in terms of minor crimes being able to ruin a person's civil standing like marijuana possession has done; and rampant abuse of overclassifying certain types of crime as felonies, thereby disqualifying someone from participation in the civic process (something I genuinely have begun to abhor as I've gotten older, because of the perverse second-class citizen caste it creates with minimal if any remedy for restoration of rights without an absurd amount of pressure being applied by someone who has paid their debt to society).
However, it is putatively rule of law. Just rule of law with the assumption of input by men. Law is in itself a tool. A tool is nothing without the hand that wields it.
What angers me more is that we don't come down harder on those that maliciously attempt to use the tools of law against other tools of law. I.e. attempting to circumvent Constitutional rights through judicial review, or passing laws that everyone knows violate one Amendment or another and relying on the small number of Supreme Court justices and their auspices to just ignore passing a final decision on a case.
Frankly it seems like a somewhat intractable problem, but nevertheless, I can't deny that the United States at least puts up a good fight in terms of trying to make it work nevertheless.
I think it's less about what formal powers the different branches of government have, and more about how they use them in practice. As a parent comment said, the USSR constitution was good on paper, but not so much in practice. On the other hand, here in the UK, the queen technically has supreme power over everything (and even ignoring that, our Prime Minister is head of both the executive and the legislature), and yet in practice this doesn't get abused too much (arguably recently that has changed a little).
The UK is a bit weird though because of its “unwritten constitution”, which acknowledges that the Queen’s power is in fact very limited (to the point where she doesn’t even publicly express opinions). It mostly works due to the specific history and culture of the UK.
> the US stance in rule of law seems a bit dubious as well
I think I agree with where you're coming from with this statement, but not necessarily with it being a negative attribute.
Yes, the US is "a nation of Laws, not of Men". That only goes so far, though. Pretty much all of the US system is set up to allow individuals to apply the law in a way that they feel to be fair. This is manifested in everything from prosecutorial discretion to jury nullification.
> the enormous sentences afflicted to people once, but only once, they end up in bad public standing
The US Constitution specifically prohibits laws that apply directly to individuals, i.e. "Bills of Attainder". In theory at least, public opinion should inform the laws that apply to everyone equally. Those laws may be capricious and draconian, but the whole idea of the American system is that laws should represent the will of the people. The absurdity of some of our laws (sentencing in particular) is nothing if not a reflection of that.
> the president pardoning his friends
This isn't an unlimited power; the president is subject to oversight by Congress. That is the implicit rationale behind the impeachment process being very loosely defined:
Article II, Section 4: "The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors."
Basically, "other high Crimes and Misdemeanors" means whatever Congress says it means. If they believe the President has abused their power through improper pardons, they can respond by impeaching and convicting them. This not only removes them from office but also bars them from public office in perpetuity.
Note also that the president only has the power to pardon federal crimes. They have no power to pardon someone convicted under state law.
> elected states attorneys incentivize to look hard on crime to their constituents
That's pretty much the nature of US law - "by the People, for the People". If a prosecutor is overzealous, then ostensibly that's the will of the people who elected them. If not, they're free to vote them out of office during the next election in favor of someone who will act in accordance with their wishes. In extreme cases there is usually (always?) a process in place for elected officials to be recalled immediately and a special election held for their replacement.
As a disclaimer, the above is representative of my understanding of US law; it's how I would explain what is, not what I believe should be.
While I see this comment as unnecessarily partisan, I agree in principle. The US Constitution's limits on federal authority have been being weakened since the day it was written.
Or, in the words of Lysander Spooner: "But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain - that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist."
One thing I find concerning is that the president seems willing to use his pardoning powers for his allies. I guess Clinton did the same with Marc Rich. It certainly doesn’t look good.
At least consider the illiberal nature [0] of the way the current administration is rooting out the corruption, compared to following established norms to lay bare the corruption for all to see. For example, consider if during the current administration's first two years they welcomed oversight from the Republican House and Senate (a co-equal branch) to investigate and clear the President of the same things the Mueller investigation was charged with -- and then that branch (not the executive) investigated the origins of the Mueller investigation, to root out corruption. That kind of co-equal power play would have been a lot stronger than the reality of a bully executive branch trying to wade into doing everything with, what seems to be, little regard for what all future presidents can now do due to precedent, so why didn't that kind of cross-power oversight happen with a Republican-controlled executive and Congress?
Traditional Chinese medicine was on its way out, and China embracing science-based medicine -- until Chairman Mao introduced "barefoot doctors" as a cheap substitute for real doctors when the Chinese health care infrastructure found itself woefully understaffed.
As it races to treat patients infected with the new coronavirus, the Chinese government is seeing potential in a cocktail of antiviral drugs. It is also recommending the Peaceful Palace Bovine Pill, a traditional Chinese medicine made with the gallstone of cattle, buffalo horn, jasmine and pearl.
> The use of these ancient Chinese remedies dovetails with a push by Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, to harness them as a source of national pride. He has said that officials should place as much importance on traditional Chinese medicines as they do on Western medicines.
This is actually scary to read, handing out placebos in the middle of an epidemic. China is going to continue being ground zero for these sorts of things (that and the developmentally-fringe parts of Africa).
A couple of years ago (2013-2016) China had an H7N9 avian flu outbreak that infected 1,223 and had a 30-40% mortality rate (COVID-19 is around 2.1%), which didn't get much Western news coverage:
>> It has been established that many of the human cases of H7N9 appear to have a link to live bird markets.
It’s not just about enforcing but also about convincing the public to abandon harmful practices.
Yao Ming, already known as a basketball star, helped a lot with spreading awareness about shark fin soup in China and compelling people to no longer eat it.
That’s not to say it will 100% stop a practice from happening, though using the right people as figureheads for a message is still effective at changing behaviors.
It’ll have to work on the margins. Yes enforcement will be a problem but top off my head I can see people massively reduce consumption for social reasons (like try not to offend your friends, business clients etc).
A law by the People’s Congress will override the myriad of local and central regulations that currently are impossible to interpret and enforce, and largely unhelpful to activists. This will help activists and lawyers a lot, too.
1) A permanent ban on the sale of live animals at public markets.
2) A strict nationwide enforcement of food safety regulations.
3) A government backed re-education campaign against the use of traditional Chinese medicine.
But we do know that China is a country 9,596,961 square km in size.
We also know that China's National Biosafety Laboratory, their only Level 4 microbiology lab, is located at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is 278 meters away (as the crow flies) from the Huanan Seafood Market. Said market has previously been speculated to be the source.
Is it simply coincidence that in a country of nearly 10 million square km the outbreak may have started less than 300 meters away from this laboratory?
> Is it simply coincidence that in a country of nearly 10 million square km the outbreak may have started less than 300 meters away from this laboratory?
Sure, why not? Coincidences happen all the time, we only pay attention to the significant ones or ones that can be used to push some agenda.
Circumstantial speculation only gets you so far, eventually you need some objective evidence.
> But worries surround the Chinese lab, too. The SARS virus has escaped from high-level containment facilities in Beijing multiple times, notes Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University in Piscataway, New Jersey. Tim Trevan, founder of CHROME Biosafety and Biosecurity Consulting in Damascus, Maryland, says that an open culture is important to keeping BSL-4 labs safe, and he questions how easy this will be in China, where society emphasizes hierarchy. “Diversity of viewpoint, flat structures where everyone feels free to speak up and openness of information are important,” he says.
You got me curious and I did a little digging. It seems like there are two facilities and it's not clear to me which one actually houses the samples in question.
This facility "Wuhan Jianghan Disease Prevention and Control Center" is actually very close to the market.
There's no street view there - seems probable this is just a normal office (there are restaurants in the same building)
It is about 14 km by car between the Market and the Institute of Virology.
What do you think about the Daily Mail article which says that the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention (WHCDC, not the Institute of Virology, my mistake) is 278 meters away? They state that virus research is being done there. From what I see on the map there are some Union Hospital buildings, but nothing specifically identified as the WHCDC.
Edit: part of the problem seems to be in searching for the exact names of the facilities.
I think Baidu Maps places WHCDC in the same complex identified in that Daily Mail article, directly across the street from the Huanan Seafood Market. (I'm a bit uncertain because I don't read Chinese, so please let me know if I've made a mistake here.)
I hope it is enforced well. A lot of loss of wildlife (tigers, rhinos, etc) in the neighboring countries is attributed to the consumption for traditional Chinese medicine.
Funnily, China has stopped issuing hunting licenses some 20 years ago, but it was still legal to catch a wild animal without "hunting" it, and killing it on the spot.
A great example of literal to the letter selective enforcement of law here.
On the contrary, you prohibit exactly "unlawful <sort of action>", e.g. "unlawful consumption of narcotics". That means that what exactly constitutes unlawfulness of such acts is a part of a different law, and usually not even a law, but a by-law or a regulation.
For example, look at the German penal code, title 184f, "Ausübung der verbotenen Prostitution" — it's literally "Practicing illegal prostitution", and it's worded that way because there is also legal one.
If you just say "prohibit trade of wild animals", that would imply China just outlawed all trade related to wild animals while the news is actually about a decision to absolutely enforce existing laws.
Again.. maybee its time to admit, that propaganda announcements out of china - are simply not worth the time and effort.
They announce to go green, and produce a potemkin village of effort.
They announce to ban trade of wild animals (2012/ 2017) and it just never is fully implemented or enforced.
China is actually even more chaotic then africa, because that nice facade of that utopian well working, strong government many int he west secretly year for, distracts from the actual chaos and routined subversion on the ground.
China has a population density only 4 times the density of the US and half the one of Germany. It has a vast amount of wildlife. Why wouldn't they have any wild animals left?
There are no more wolverines in the wolverine state. There are no california bears in california. And of course we almost wiped out the american bald eagle.
If china wants to catch up to the US or Europe, they had to do a lot more exterminating.
There is a lot of stupid and non-sense talk about how the coronavirus was created, because of Chinese people eating bats.
There is no scientific evidence to support this!
Instead, this exposes the deep-seated biases and prejudices, that Westerners (white people) have of Easterners, and specifically, the Chinese, in this case. It also didn’t help that the Trump Administration went on a negative media assault for the past 3 years to demonize the Chinese, so they are now an easy scapegoat for all troubles in the world. This really does not help the situation.
Now, how about a different theory?
Animals normally develop immunity to their environment, and from the viruses that exist in that area. This is the law of natural selection in play. Those that survive, go on and reproduce, and carry the antibodies to protect their offspring. Those that don’t, will die off, and their bodies will be eaten by vultures.
I suspect that the coronavirus mutated and appeared, because of an animal from one part of the world, was shipped to another part of the world, where it didn’t have natural immunity to the diseases of that region. In this case, a bat carrying the virus.
Maybe an animal from Africa, was transported to Asia, where it would have never traveled there by itself. That animal got sick, and triggered a mutation, which infected a human handling it, which mutated again, and infected another human, and now, we have an outbreak.
The key to understanding this may be in how the MERS virus appeared. It’s believed to come from bats, which infected a camel, which infected a human. Do people in the Middle East eat camels? No, I don’t think so.
So why should SARS and this COVID-19 virus be any different?
Limiting the transport of live animals, to different areas of the world, should help minimize future virus outbreaks. But, humans have been transporting live animals all over the world, for hundreds or thousands of years, ever since boats were first invented. So I suspect, that it is only a matter of time before another novel coronavirus appears. And global warming may also be playing a factor too, in triggering viruses and diseases in nature, that had previously been dormant.
This is HN. Most people here are scientifically and technically educated. Do your part. Analyze the situation scientifically. Change the narrative. Otherwise, we risk devolving into our deep seated fears and prejudices. We lose our humanity in the process.
Wherever it may come from, I think many people are happy to have an angle to attack a certain category of Chinese for their perception and treatment of animals.
The hunting and extinction of species due to these ridiculous primitive beliefs is utterly repugnant in this day and age where we teeter on the brink of environmental disaster and mass extinctions with climate and other causes.
Exchanging true fascinating living treasures of earth evolved over millions of years all the way back to this planets creation for some baubles and to satisfy their tummies or supposedly treat some fucking wart, or even save them from a heart attack, really, those selfish beings are worth the torture and extinctions ?
It also simply hurts and inspires rage to truly consider and witness the absolutely mind boggling levels of cruelty shown in the hunting, keeping and processing of these animals.
How is one to like humans that think themselves so superior and special over everything else that they may be allowed to do anything? Its the worst of "humanity" and we can be well glad to loose that aspect of it.
Unfortunately may these Chinese with disregard and 0 empathy for animals be a minority or not of, the scale of the country make it too many by far.
Ebola jumped with bushmeat- and this is not a prejudice. This is just fact. Travell to china, see for yourself on a wet market in the morning.
You can get everything there.
Of course with the foreigners prices, but nearly everything.
Our best guess is that SARS originated from bats and jumped to humans via masked palm civets, which are typically sold in live animal markets in China. This is not just my own pet theory, you can read the extensive literature on the topic.
Camel meat has always been popular in the Middle East. About 3M camels are slaughtered for meat every year. It's similar to beef, and considered a halal meat for Muslims.
What's your point? Most people cook their meat before eating whether it's camels, bats, or civet cats. The serious cross-species disease transmission risk is from unsanitary practices in handling live animals and raw meat before cooking.
Fully killing off viruses would require bringing the internal temperature of the meat to around 70 degrees C. People do not typically do this for red meat as the resulting texture is unappealing.
I don’t think anybody said that somebody ate a civet and got sick. However, civets are not naturally to be found in close proximity to humans. The jump from species to species was due to the appetite for civets causing them to be held in cages at wet markets for prolonged periods of time.
When you have a market for rare 'natural wondercures' being sought out, it only takes one mutation in a virus to spread on from another mammal to humans, add to that China's population density. A recipe for disaster.