Southern China food markets breeding ground for new diseases

Researchers say that three or four pandemic flus emerge from Southern China each century (the most recent example being SARS, which claimed over 700 victims in 2003). The Chinese government is attempting to address the problem, but faces difficult cultural and medical challenges.

• Most flu pandemics are thought to have emerged from live animal markets.
• Customers peer at the caged animals before choosing their meal of the day.
• They watch as the butcher cuts up the animal with knives and machetes, spreading blood, guts, faeces and urine all over the market floor.
• People from South China believe that eating wild animals is good for their health and vitality, and gulping down such exotic fare as cobra and Asiatic brush tailed porcupine is seen as a symbol of social status.
• It was from just such a market in a village near the provincial capital of Guangzhou that researchers believe the deadly SARS virus originated in 2003, with civet cats high on the list of suspects.
• The respiratory disease, which killed 774 people and sickened 8,098 in 30 nations, sparked panic in nearby Hong Kong, with most of its 7 million residents donning masks in a bid not to be infected when someone coughed or sneezed.
• The Asian flu of 1957 and the Hong Kong flu of 1968 are both believed to have originated in southern China, while the Russian flu of 1977, which appeared in the city of Anshan, was widely thought to be a re-emergence of the 1957 flu.
• And some experts, including Kennedy Shortridge, who worked in Hong Kong for many years and teaches at New Zealand's Auckland University, believe the Spanish flu of 1918 spread along the Chinese coast and was carried to America by Chinese immigrants.
• Outside the city limits, farmers eat, sleep and work in teeming and cramped quarters with ducks, chickens and pigs in traditional and often squalid conditions, creating a toxic brew that can easily spread to the modern China, and to the rest of the world.
• Early on, a lack of regulations, record-keeping and research between Hong Kong and China, and a suppression of information by Beijing, stunted any efforts to clamp down on outbreaks.