Who all are missing pizza, momos, noodles, burgers, and street food nowadays? I guess everybody is. Especially, those who are as good at cooking as Sunny Deol at dancing.
After that pizza delivery boy infected several people with coronavirus, people must be choosing their health over pizza cravings. This made ordering food online a touch-and-go affair.
Food habits vary from person to person. While some people like animals and even adopt them as pets, there are some who also like animals, not because they wish to pet them, but because they like to eat them.
Vegetarians are judged for not having such a delicious and nutritious food and non-vegetarians are judged for killing animals.
Both categories justify their actions and try to pull each other to their side.
The reason for the coronavirus outbreak, according to many health experts, is the consumption of wildlife animals.
As we know, the first transmission was from China’s Wet markets where wild animals including marmots, birds, rabbits, bats, and snakes are traded illegally. And then the virus spread worldwide regardless of the fact whether you have eaten the bat or not.
Is Blaming China Alright?
The culture of China allowed eating and trading of wild animals from the beginning. Earlier in 2002-2003, we experienced a similar virus strain known as SARS-CoV (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome- Coronavirus) but health authorities somehow managed to deal swiftly with the threat of SAR-CoV and rapidly contained the illness.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), “SARS-CoV is thought to be an animal virus from an as-yet-uncertain animal reservoir, perhaps bats then spread to other animals (civet cats) and then jumped to humans“. That was supposed to be a teaching for every country out there that illegally traded wildlife animals.
But China didn’t pay attention. Again, in 2019, the new strain of Coronavirus named SARS-CoV-2 emerged, causing the baneful disease we now know as COVID-19.
On March 11, 2020,WHO declared COVID-19 a pandemic. Every country convicted China. But China, being its usual stubborn self, neither admitted nor apologized for spreading this deadly disease.
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History Repeats Itself
The hunt for the animal source of COVID-19 is still unknown. However, Coronavirus are common in certain species of animals, such as cattle and camels. But this new strain of coronavirus is likely to have come from bats and pangolins.
This is not the first time when the whole world is suffering due to the food habits of some. Several zoonotic diseases (a disease that can be transmitted from animals to people or, more specifically, a disease that normally exists in animals but that can infect humans) have spread earlier that took many lives.
In 2009, the H1N1 swine flu circulated in pig farms in North America and then jumped to humans becoming a global pandemic that killed hundreds of thousands of people.
In the early 20th century, the world fought with the Influenza pandemic. The pandemic emerged as a result of triple viral reassortment between two influenza lineages that had been circulating in pigs for years.
The global SARS outbreak from 2002 to 2003 was the first Coronavirus strain. The Ebola outbreak in West Africa from 2015-2016, believed to be originated from bats, proved fatal.
World Health Organization (WHO) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have been warning us that the most emerging infectious disease come from animals and our industrialized farming practices are ratcheting up the risk.
Could We Be More Selfish?
Non-vegetarians always pay attention to the positive side of eating animals. For them, they are full of nutrition, protein, and vitamins and of course, they are delectable.
Plus non-vegetarians are proud of themselves because they are helping in the maintenance of ecological balance by balancing the food chain.
What they forget is that they are the reason why millions of animals are killed every day for their taste buds. The methane gas that is produced in the slaughterhouses is responsible for global warming.
The most popular beef results in five times more climate-warming emissions than chicken or pork. According to researchers, giving up beef will reduce carbon footprint more than cars.
Save Animals, Save Yourself And Save People
We can conclude that some of the world’s most fatal diseases, such as HIV, SARS, MERS, Ebola including the novel coronavirus, all emerged from bushmeat (the meat of African wild animals as food). Also, according to the World Economic Forums, “Consumption of bushmeat at the same pace could cause the next pandemic”.
According to the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), “If we keep consuming and slaughtering animals, then by 2050 more people could end-up dying of diseases like COVID-19 than that of cancer”.
If we continue to eat animals and don’t change our food habits, then the pandemics and viruses will become common and will come from the animal planet.
Image credits: Google images
Source: Vox, Wired, Medical News Today, and more
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This post is tagged under: coronavirus, zoonotic diseases, various viruses, pandemics in the past, world, reason, eating animals, consuming animals, spread of diseases from animals, bats, pangoline, bushmeat, next virus, next pandemic animal related
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