The SARS Market

In 1996, I attended a wedding in Guangzhou, China. We stayed at the White Swan hotel where, in each room, they had pictures of past guests including Henry Kissinger and Nixon. More recently, Kim Jong-il, the North Korean dictator, bought out the whole hotel for his visit to this Chinese industrial region north of Hong Kong.

An interesting thing about this place was the pool area. The pool was teaming with single mothers and their newly adopted Chinese babies. The place was the main staging area for newly associated mothers and children before they departed for home. It was surreal and seemed very odd with these 50 or so kids and their new mom’s. Quite the industry.

But the most interesting thing about the whole trip was the Guangzhou wildlife market. This is the same market that they now believe was ground zero for the SARS virus. I fully understand why.

Now this is no pet zoo. Everything for sale was intended to be eaten. There were relatively “normal” animals like bunnies and kitties.

Eels and snakes were not even that surprising to me as I have eaten both previously:

The turtles were rather disturbing. On the left of this image, you can see them stacked in a crate. They were alive. Even more disturbing was one stall where you could buy the live turtle separate from the shell. When I walked up, I couldn’t figure out what the creature was that was moving around. I had never seen a turtle without its shell.

The endangered species and bats on sticks got even weirder:

But the civet was the kingpin. The keeper of the SARS virus. The animal in the picture was caged adjacent to this gaggle of geese. They were none to happy as you can see from their obvious panic.

These markets still exist all over the world. It’s just a matter of time before more of these viruses come out of hiding with such fertile grounds for distribution. Bat-cicle anyone?