China coronavirus spread is accelerating, Xi Jinping warns.

Mike BSE happened because of our farming practices, mechanical meat recovery probably, Asian countries have likely had their wet markets more or less forever, they must generally work without too many public health issues given how many there are and how long they have been around.

It might turn our stomachs seeing the insects in wet markets, god I was watching insects flying around on and over the meat in an SM Hypermarket last month, but the reality is that it is currently working for those countries.

Spanish Flu in 1918 was an Avian flu that some think think originated at Fort Riley in Kansas, this is due to analyses of similarities with other Avian flu viruses, the human pandemic preceded reports of infections in birds and swine, apparently pigs are more susceptible to bird flu than we are, anyway they think that it was the deployment of soldiers from Kansas around the world that caused the initial spread.

Nothing that we can do is ever going to stop viruses from occasionally crossing species boundaries, they have been doing it for billions of years and will continue as long as life exists on this planet.

Viruses that have just jumped from one species to another are often excessively fatal, this is not good news for the virus because it reduces the virus's chance of survival, they need to mutate to become less harmful in order to become popular and able to find lots of hosts and to be able to continue to propagate.

Every flu season is a new variant of a flu virus, they're rarely if ever the same virus that came round last year, it's a constant battle of mutation and it is a lottery.

My point is that one an make the general point that wet markets could and almost certainly result in bacterial cross contamination in the products sold in those markets, you can draw the conclusion that wet markets can be a source of sickness, and you can conclude that they could be cleaned up.

But you cannot draw the conclusion that wet markets directly cause cross species mutation, Ebola has likely existed since the 1960s and was first identified in 1976, the other cases you mention represent a very small number of events over a 50 year period, these cross species jump events are fairly rare.

These viruses are only going to affect human beings if they have evolved the appropriate mechanisms to enter our cells and hijack human DNA in order to replicate, if they haven't done that then it does not matter where a meat product came from or how they are consumed or cooked you simply won't get sick from a virus that does not know how to utilise your species to replicate, you might get sick from bacterial cross contamination but not because of a virus mutation unless the mutation helps it infect your species.

Viruses are evolution in action they always have been, with our current tools we can see that evolution happening right before our eyes year by year in countless virus strains all over the world, a tiny number of events result in changes that could cause a virus to jump from another species to being infectious in humans, indeed viruses in humans can and do mutate in ways that can make them more or less dangerous, generally they will evolve to be less dangerous because otherwise the hosts die out before the virus can spread.

Wet markets are just one transmission vector for disease there are countless others.

One interesting fact, in 2008 pigs from several farms died in the Philippines rom something that hadn't been seen before, the USA tested samples and found "Ebola Reston" virus, it was the first time an Ebola virus had been detected in livestock.

Six workers tested positive for the virus but no one got sick, so far Ebola Reston does not cause disease in humans, if it mutates maybe it will but so far nothing.

The point is that we have to be careful about drawing cause and effect conclusions without hard evidence, wet markets do not cause mutation but they may provide an opening for a mutation when it occurs, these are chance events and a slightly different species jump story could play out even in our highly regulated food production industries in the west.

If this proves to be true, then China has a lot to explain about this whole affair.

I still think that, somehow, they engineered the virus, but they must have totally disregarded the fact of how it evolves and changes as it goes along..

Two cases confirmed in the UK................

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-7951403/Coronavirus-hits-UK.html

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-51325192

https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1236004/coronavirus-latest-England-case-confirmed-update-symptoms

Getting worse........

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-51338899

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/ar...-flu-like-symptoms-escorted-plane-Dublin.html