Weil in China exotische Wildtiere gegessen werden, warnten Forscher schon vor Jahren vor einem erneuten Corona-Ausbruch. Doch auch europäische Gewohnheiten vergrößern die Gefahr.
www.spiegel.de
@O' Be Joyful, your turn
Why cain't you figger this crap out?
What researchers know about the origin of the pandemic
Because exotic wild animals are eaten in China, researchers warned years ago of another corona outbreak. But European habits also increase the danger.
By Julia Köppe
28.03.2020, 1:11 p.m.
The sentence sounds like a corona oracle: "The presence of a large reservoir of Sars-CoV-like viruses in horseshoe bats, together with the tradition of eating exotic mammals in southern China, is a time bomb," says a study from the Journal "Clinical Microbiology Reviews", which was published in 2007 and is currently haunting social networks. The year of publication is encircled in many posts.
In the study, researchers from Hong Kong analyzed the Sars pandemic in 2002 and 2003. The pathogen at the time is closely related to the current circulating corona virus, which is why it is called Sars-CoV-2, and the disease apparently also originated from a market in China.
The researchers' warning is now fueling a debate shaped by racist and pseudo-scientific fallacies. "I would like certain ethnic groups to stop eating bats, armadillos, monkey skulls and other shit," wrote a CDU local politician on Twitter, and he posted the picture of chopsticks. The tweet has now been deleted, racism remains.
Pandemic risk
A look at the latest pandemic history reveals that it is not just Chinese eating habits that have unleashed pandemics. Even those who only eat animals on European menus are not safe from diseases. On the contrary: One of the most devastating viruses probably jumped from the most popular food animal in Germany to humans, the pig.
In early 1918, a doctor in the US state of Kansas documented a disease that caused high fever and cough and would spread worldwide in the coming years. 50 million people died of the plague known as the Spanish flu. In the meantime, researchers have been able to locate the probable origin in the US Midwest, where the swine virus has spread to humans. (Read more about this here.)
In the decades that followed, the H1N1 virus continued to sleep in pigs and triggered another pandemic in 2009: swine flu.
https://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft...h-sind-a-bcfe8de8-3e04-49e8-9955-6f00e382d309