General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Rocker Bryan Adams under fire for tweet about 'bat eating, wet market animal selling, virus making [View all]moriah
(8,311 posts)Either way, the US government was encouraging every family to have a flock of chickens for an increase in home-based food supplies to allow for the war effort, then sending young men from everywhere who were exposed to both human and avian influenzas in their home communities to extremely crowded army cantonments. Pigs weren't absolutely necessary here.
My sister utterly spoils her chickens and mainly uses them as a source of eggs, even knowing this.
What I find more interesting is testing done for exposure to bat coronaviruses (the closest to this one was still bat in origin) in rural China showed many people with evidence of infection. Not because they hunted or ate bats, but because bats contaminate a lot of things and have a wide range, plus carry a lot of diseases.
But rural China IS the source of the live animals -- whatever they might be, but probably not bats -- that are sold in the wet markets.
Several of the articles suggesting reasons to disbelieve that this virus came from a lab also suggested it had experienced passage in a human or other-than-bat-but-human-like immune system in order to gain certain mutations for how it binds to the ACE2 receptor.
So while it's potentially possible Patient Zero brought a contaminated animal, which infected other like-immune animals, to a wet market....
Since not all of the original cases had any direct ties to the wet market in question or other ones, it's quite possible the infected animal that spread it all over the city was the human, whilst doing their other business after selling their animals (who might or might not have had it).