Coronavirus: Blame The Unhygienic Meat Trade

Instead of culling animals in the event of an outbreak, the more civilised thing to do is to examine the industry’s practices

- Pt Jyothi Datta

It was on an uninvited visit to a slaughterhouse many years ago, that a disturbing truth was revealed. The humans working and residing in these areas lived in as despicable a condition as they kept the animals.

The unmistakable stale stench that hung oppressively, the wet boggy ground and the lack of medical officers to check if the animals being brought in were sick or diseased — it was a classic recipe for disaster. The message from these squalor-filled human and animal cohabitations was ominous: Ensure hygiene and better farm practices in the meat industry, if you don’t want to have disease-ridden meat coming to your table or viruses jumping species and mutating dangerously to infect and kill humans.

This grim truth has reared its head again as the international scientific community now investigates the source of the mutating and governments scramble to keep their people safe from it.

Early reports from China’s Wuhan, the deadly ground zero from where the coronavirus has spread, points to the seafood market as a possible source. Scientific reports point to the usual suspects as the possible source of the virus — bats, snakes and the exotic live wild animals housed there. In fact, with the coronavirus threatening to mutate and cause greater damage, the Chinese health officials have banned the trade of wild animals, at least for the time being.

Earlier cases