Martin Williams

Opinion | China coronavirus: Beijing should close down live-animal food markets to stop similar diseases emerging in future

Science shows fears of imminent doom are groundless. In evolutionary terms, a disease that relies on human-to-human transmission tends to be mild; infected people have to be well enough to spread it

Nevertheless, as long as markets exist that sell exotic animals for food, the likelihood of other new diseases emerging will remain

Reading Time:4 minutes

Why you can trust SCMP

Members of the Wuhan Hygiene Emergency Response Team conduct searches in the shuttered Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, Hubei province, on January 11. Photo: AFP

Martin Williams

Published: 2:00am, 25 Jan 2020Updated: 4:14am, 25 Jan 2020

Pandemic diseases have sometimes caused huge death tolls in history – notably, bubonic plague killed an estimated 50 million in Europe alone during the 14th century, and the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 infected maybe 500 million people worldwide, killing between 20 and 50 million. Thus, the emergence of a new disease is understandably attention-grabbing.

That’s the case now, given the sudden outbreak of a coronavirus that is likely to have originated among exotic animals sold for food in mainland China, and which strongly recalls the Sars pandemic that killed 299 of the 1,755 people infected in Hong Kong in 2003.

Perhaps it's all too easy to get caught up in notions of imminent doom, like in a real-life disaster movie. I’ve been there before, transfixed by dire online predictions about severe acute respiratory syndrome, and influenza researcher Robert Webster’s warning that bird flu could kill up to half the human population.

But science reveals that such fears are groundless, while also pointing towards steps that individuals and governments can take to reduce the spread of disease and the potential for pandemics.

While it may not seem obvious, this coronavirus can’t become widespread while causing a significantly higher fatality rate: it is capable of mutating and evolving, which can put a natural brake on its virulence.