The outbreak of the deadly microbe novel coronavirus 2019-nCoV, the World Health Organization’s official designation of the Wuhan coronavirus, could not have come at a worse time for Asia. The virus began spreading at the onset of the Buddhist Lunar New Year, a holiday celebrated around Asia and highlighted by a major increase in air, rail, auto, and other transportation related to family visitations and vacations. Major losses in retail, travel, and tourism sectors resulted from the spreading of the coronavirus.

Although there are a variety of coronaviruses, the current virus is only the third one known to spread from animals to humans, a process known as zoonosis. In 2003, a coronavirus in civets, badgers, and dogs spread to humans in China, resulting in the rapid worldwide spreading of the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in over 32 countries and resulted in over 800 deaths. SARS, like the present coronavirus, resulted in a massive impact on transportation and a temporary negative economic impact on China and other Asian countries. One alarming note is that the Wuhan coronavirus has spread faster than was the case with SARS.

In 2012, the second known species-jumping coronavirus, known as the Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), was traced to Egyptian tomb bats. However, camels served as the actual bridge for the virus to infect humans, the virus having had remained dormant in the camels for some 20 years. The first reported MERS case was in Saudi Arabia and it rapidly spread around the Middle East and beyond.

The current novel coronavirus has been linked to the sale of exotic animal meat in a Wuhan food market that specializes in seafood but apparently also sells the meat of dogs, deer, minks, snakes, and bats. Other pathogens, like H5N1 influenza and the Ebola virus, germinated in animal hosts prior to their spread to humans. With world air and sea temperatures increasing, our planet is providing novel viruses and other pathogens with a massive Petri dish that permits unimpeded mutation and virulence. The World Health Organization has cited increased rainfall and high humidity as factors contributing to the appearance of new infectious diseases.

Humans and other species not only face the danger of drastic climate change permitting viral “bugs” to flourish, but there is the threat that some of the most dangerous pathogens, including coronaviruses that are stored in Biosafety Level 4 (BSL-4) laboratories around the world, could accidentally be released into nurturing environments. With such unintended releases of such deadly biological warfare agents, climatic and social factors permit such deadly bugs as coronaviruses to infect large numbers of humans and animals.

The United States signed, along with the United Kingdom and the USSR, the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and on their Destruction or “BWC.” Evidence suggests that the CIA merely transferred its bio-war programs to the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) in Fort Detrick, Maryland where bio-warfare research was being conducted under the cover of “non-proliferation” enforcement and research. Other banned research was conducted at Fort Detrick’s British counterpart at the Defense Evaluation and Research Agency (DERA) in Porton Down in Wiltshire, England.

The Chinese Academy of Sciences operates China’s only known BSL-4 research laboratory, coincidentally or not, at the Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory, in the same city where the new coronavirus first appeared.

On October 16, 2014, President Barack Obama ordered the severance of federal funding for risky government experimentation that studied certain infectious agents by making them more dangerous. The timing of the White House announcement was odd, considering that it was being reported around the same time that the H1N1 swine influenza “novel” strain was the product of resurrecting the deadly 1918 Spanish flu from DNA extracted by scientists, attached to the U.S. Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Rockville, Maryland, from the corpse of a female Inuit teen who died from the disease in 1918. The teen died during the deadly worldwide Spanish flu pandemic.

U.S. government-funded scientists reportedly succeeded in combining the resurrected Spanish flu DNA with other viruses, including swine and avian flu. The White House order in October 2014 asked scientists conducting research on influenza, SARS and MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome), and other coronaviruses such as the Hong Kong and New Haven viruses, to “voluntarily” halt all current research. It is not known how deeply President Obama delved into the work of USAMRIID, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the Centers of Disease Control (CDC), and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and whether he discover that the Biological Warfare Convention of 1972 was being routinely violated. In addition to H1N1 flu, scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison were researching ways to make H5N1 avian flu capable of “species jumping” from ferrets to humans.

With a global environment that facilitates the incubation and spreading of dangerous pathogens, the type of moratorium enacted by Obama on making viruses more dangerous should become a worldwide cessation of such research. There is the possibility of accidental release of biological agents. The U.S. record on willfully subjecting populations to dangerous agents and substances is particularly outrageous. There is also the increasing problem of antimicrobial resistance with the environment playing a role in the ability of certain bacteria, viruses, and parasites to become resistant to antibiotic, antiviral, and antimalarial treatment.

The U.S. government, with suspicions of CIA involvement, was subjecting African-American to injections with syphilis as late as 1972. The U.S. Public Health Service forced syphilis infection operation was coordinated with Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. The Atomic Energy Commission, again, with suspected Central Intelligence Agency involvement, subjected American civilians and military personnel, including the population of Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands, as well as Australian citizens, to radiation experiments as part of Projects SUNSHINE and GABRIEL.

With the possibility that human-engineered or naturally-occurring corona or other viruses could threaten the world with a pandemic, it is sobering to recognize that the Donald Trump administration scrapped the position of the National Security Council position responsible for dealing with the outbreak of a pandemic. In May 2018, Rear Admiral Timothy Ziemer and his team were sent packing, leaving the National Security Council without any expertise to deal with either a pandemic or a bio-terrorism attack. Similarly, Trump has taken the budget axe to the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health, leaving the United States without the critical infrastructure required to deal with a pandemic emergency. Combined with an administration policy that is anti-science in nature, the United States, which once proactively dealt with dangerous disease outbreaks in Africa and elsewhere, is now in a totally reactive and weak position to deal with such emergencies as climate change allows even deadlier pathogens to develop and spread.

Plagues from the east are nothing new. The Black Death and other epidemics arrived in Europe from China during the 1300’s, killing a large percentage of its population. Much of this pestilence came from rats that stowed away on merchant ships coming from the east.

At the end of World War I, another pandemic, wrongly called the Spanish flu, killed an estimated 18 to 50 million people in Europe and North America.

Seventeen years after the SARS virus killed some 800 people in China and Canada and terrified the entire world, a new plague threatens the West: the Wuhan Coronavirus.

Officially named 2019-nCoV, the new virus has so far infected over 800 people in China. This latest plague erupted in the central Chinese city of Wuhan, population 11 million, which is located on the Yangtze River and is an important hub for national communications.

Like SARS, the Wuhan virus is believed to have come from a live animal market that specializes in exotic animals from the Himalayas or China’s remote mountain regions. Serving exotic animals at dinner parties is a big status symbol in China. Sometimes they are even served while still alive. Dog meat is a favorite in northern China.

SARS was believed to have come from civet cats. As a result, thousands of these felines were brutally killed. But it was later determined the virus originated from bats, then spread to other captive animals. Bat soup is another Chinese delicacy.

Keeping large numbers of captive animals crammed together in cages with poor ventilation and no cleaning is an ideal vector for viral diseases. Each year, China consumes 730 million pigs. Fifty percent of China’s factory farmed pigs have so far contracted lethal swine flu. Rising living standards have boosted demand for pork.

I have seen how China raises and transports pigs. It’s a nightmare of brutality and inhuman behavior. No wonder so many of these intelligent sensitive animals fall ill and die. Swine fever could be payback for China’s terrible cruelty to pigs.

And it’s not just China. Pigs in North America are treated almost as badly. A lady where I live was actually jailed and prosecuted for having given water to a truckload of thirsty, starving, terrified pigs on the way to the slaughterhouse.

In North America, animals destined for slaughter are packed together and then dosed with heavy antibiotics to combat communicable diseases from over-crowding and mistreatment.

When the SARS epidemic erupted in South China 17 years ago, the Chinese communist party tried to hush up the crisis, allowing infected people to travel to North America and Europe.

This time, China did the right thing by jumping hard on the epidemic: shutting down all air, sea and land communications with the greater Wuhan region and 14 smaller cities – right in the middle of China’s huge new year celebrations when over 400 million people return to their homes. The epidemic could not have come at a worse time.

Some Wuhan residents have already flown to other parts of Asia and North America. Simply checking incoming air travellers for fever will not prevent the virus from spreading or identify passengers who have contracted and are developing the illness.

A better solution would be to quarantine all people arriving from Central China and even bar airlines coming from there until we better understand the new virus. We stop so-called ‘terrorists’ and Muslims from flying to our shores. Why not potentially infective people?

China must also be pressed to cease its dangerous, inhumane trade in exotic wild animals and urged to treat all animals with humanity and care. China is a major cause of species loss. Aside from a few brave animal rights groups, there is very little consciousness of our animal neighbors in China nor understanding that animals are sentient beings with emotions similar to those of humans. The Chinese are one of the most intelligent people on earth. Yet when it comes to animals, all they see is walking food.

As I’ve seen on my travels across China, it has made great strides in public sanitation and cleanliness as well as planting trees. Now, it’s time to stop abusing animals or the plagues will keep coming.

ericmargolis.com