China's filthy food and corruption will kill us all one day

[Argus]

So once again we have a strange new, mutated virus coming out of China. And once again, rather than dealing with it the Chinese authorities did their best to downplay it and pretend it didn't exist for as long as they could, allowing it to spread far and wide. Once again the source is China's utterly corrupt, horrifically awful food handling system, which has rock bottom sanitation levels all the way through from farms to restaurants. China is so corrupt and so many people care so little for anyone else that some greedy assed company executives replaced ingredients in baby food with cheap crap that killed babies. Where else would people do that?

You want to know all about the care taken with food there? Let's talk about gutter oil. It's the perfect example. Never heard of gutter oil? Gutter oil is 'recycled' cooking oil derived from  restaurant fryers, grease traps, slaughterhouse waste and sewage from sewer drains. Yes, it's illegal, but it's been going on for years, and makes up about 10% of cooking oil in China. All kinds of toxic chemicals are routinely found in Chinese foot and beverages, all designed to save money for the producer. Food handling factories often fail examinations by western companies.

There are horror stories, obviously," Mathieu Labasse, Asia Inspection's vice president told CNN by phone. "We find factories that just have no basic idea about hygiene standards. People that handle the food, they have no gloves, nothing." Labasse said there was a host of reasons for the failings. In some cases, laboratory tests found abnormal levels of pesticides, antibiotics, heavy metals, bacteria or viruses that could put consumers at risk.

 

https://www.cnn.com/2015/01/16/world/china-food-safety/index.html

 

Now, new evidence is emerging that officials in Wuhan deliberately downplayed the virus, even after formally notifying the World Health Organization on Dec. 31 about what the WHO described as “a cluster of cases of pneumonia of unknown cause.”

But the Wuhan government took a “refrigerating strategy” in the early days of the viral spread, a doctor at Wuhan Union Hospital told China News Weekly. Medical staff were banned from speaking publicly about what was taking place or accepting media interviews, the doctor said. Police in Wuhan also said in early January that they had arrested eight people for spreading “rumours” about what was then a little-understood pneumonia affecting a growing number of people.

Another person claiming to be a Wuhan physician wrote to the National Health Commission this week claiming that doctors in the city were told not to report “viral pneumonia” in their imaging reports between Jan. 12 and Jan. 16 — a period during which local officials delivered sunny reports on a local situation under control.

 

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/article-weeks-before-lockdown-wuhan-authorities-used-refrigerating-strategy/

 

So you combine a food system filled with contamination and a government which does its best to hide any issues and you have a perfect storm where viruses can develop, evolve and spread before anyone can do anything about it. One of these days one of these viruses is going to emerge from China and kill the whole damn bunch of us.

 

 

 

Edited January 25, 2020 by Argus

[Moonlight Graham]

The Chinese are our faithful friends and mean us no harm: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/chinese-researcher-escorted-from-infectious-disease-lab-amid-rcmp-investigation-1.5211567

[Michael Hardner]

3 hours ago, Moonlight Graham said:

The Chinese are our faithful friends and mean us no harm: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/chinese-researcher-escorted-from-infectious-disease-lab-amid-rcmp-investigation-1.5211567

Your post appears to me to be off-topic.  The OP is about concerning practices in an information-locked dictatorship.  This is about an academic who might be stealing research secrets ?

I could post the chicken fried rice recipe I had last Friday, if you're into it 

 

[Moonlight Graham]

38 minutes ago, Michael Hardner said:

Your post appears to me to be off-topic.  The OP is about concerning practices in an information-locked dictatorship.  This is about an academic who might be stealing research secrets ?

I could post the chicken fried rice recipe I had last Friday, if you're into it 

The OP is broadly about the coronavirus and the sneaky a-hole Chinese government.

My link is about an infectious disease lab in Canada, where the Chinese were stealing secrets from Canada's government.  An infectious disease lab.  Sneaky lying China government.  Infectious diseases.

As Argus says, maybe China will kill us all one day. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biopreparat

[Michael Hardner]

Ok well I am in the dark here.  

[bush_cheney2004]

If China were to implement harsh measures to stem longstanding cultural and practical customs for the breeding and consumption of "fresh meat" in dense populations, they would be crucified here for being "totalitarian".   

China was already facing a huge African swine fever kill from last year, putting more pressure on protein sources.

 

Quote

The epidemic shows the limits of China’s emphasis on government-driven, top-down solutions to major problems, sometimes at the expense of the practical. It has also laid bare the struggle of a country of 1.4 billion people to feed itself.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/17/business/china-pigs-african-swine-fever.html

 

 

[Argus]

11 hours ago, bush_cheney2004 said:

If China were to implement harsh measures to stem longstanding cultural and practical customs for the breeding and consumption of "fresh meat" in dense populations, they would be crucified here for being "totalitarian".   

They ARE totalitarian. What they might or might not do about fresh meat would be irrelevant to that. How long before a virus comes from they're unhygienic practices which is far more deadly than SARS? Given that Chinese travel the world now in large numbers such a virus could spread widely before the Chinese are willing to even admit there's a problem. Do you know how many viruses we can cure? None. A plague with results similarly to the 'black plague' is quite possible.

[bush_cheney2004]

1 hour ago, Argus said:

They ARE totalitarian. What they might or might not do about fresh meat would be irrelevant to that. How long before a virus comes from they're unhygienic practices which is far more deadly than SARS? Given that Chinese travel the world now in large numbers such a virus could spread widely before the Chinese are willing to even admit there's a problem. Do you know how many viruses we can cure? None. A plague with results similarly to the 'black plague' is quite possible.

 

Apparently not "totalitarian" enough...cultural practices and reality on the ground still finds millions of people consuming meat and living in close proximity to animals that are vectors for such viruses.   Common influenza sickens and kills far more each year around the world than any "plague" from China.

Thank you for meeting my expectation that another panicked, "we're all gonna die" thread would result from the latest worldly dance with contagion, same as before (SARS, MERS, Ebola, etc.).   

Break out the masks and hand sanitizer....again.

 

 

 

[Argus]

2 hours ago, bush_cheney2004 said:

Apparently not "totalitarian" enough...cultural practices and reality on the ground still finds millions of people consuming meat and living in close proximity to animals that are vectors for such viruses.

We're not talking about not being able to consume meat in proximity to animals. We're talking about dangerous, unhygienic practices which would never be tolerated in a western food system. Like scraping gunk out of a sewer to use as cooking oil.

2 hours ago, bush_cheney2004 said:

Common influenza sickens and kills far more each year around the world than any "plague" from China.

And this is of what value as a response? No one should bother doing anything until we suddenly get a deadly disease that kills tens or hundreds of millions?

2 hours ago, bush_cheney2004 said:

Thank you for meeting my expectation that another panicked,

Nobody is panicking. I'm simply pointing out the dangers the world faces from China's food processing system when it's so often filled with contaminated food.

[bush_cheney2004]

2 minutes ago, Argus said:

We're not talking about not being able to consume meat in proximity to animals. We're talking about dangerous, unhygienic practices which would never be tolerated in a western food system. Like scraping gunk out of a sewer to use as cooking oil.

 

China is not the "West"....by design.  China is far older culturally and has managed to survive great calamities before.   The "totalitarian" government tried to stop local practices for avian and other flu vectors with limited success.   And it also has to deal with pathogens from imported meat.... from the "West".   Feeding 1.4 billion people is a daunting task.

 

Quote

And this is of what value as a response? No one should bother doing anything until we suddenly get a deadly disease that kills tens or hundreds of millions?

 

Value = objective perspective

 

Quote

Nobody is panicking. I'm simply pointing out the dangers the world faces from China's food processing system when it's so often filled with contaminated food.

 

OK...but China is very much aware of such deficiencies.   The "West" is not without such instances....just fewer and smaller in scale (e.g. Maple Leaf Foods Listeriosis outbreak North York, Ontario - 2008).  

 

[Argus]

17 hours ago, bush_cheney2004 said:

China is not the "West"....by design. 

That is an inane thing to write. By design? They designed China not to be like the West? Seriously? Do you read this stuff after you spit it out?

17 hours ago, bush_cheney2004 said:

China is far older culturally and has managed to survive great calamities before. 

And managed to lose millions to various calamities, wars and plagues in the process. How nice for them.

17 hours ago, bush_cheney2004 said:

The "totalitarian" government

Why do you put that in quotes? Are you questioning whether China has a totalitarian government? I know you're a big fan of Russia. Are you a big fan of China too?

17 hours ago, bush_cheney2004 said:

tried to stop local practices for avian and other flu vectors with limited success.  

Then it needs to try harder.

17 hours ago, bush_cheney2004 said:

And it also has to deal with pathogens from imported meat.... from the "West".  

Cite, please.

17 hours ago, bush_cheney2004 said:

OK...but China is very much aware of such deficiencies.   The "West" is not without such instances....just fewer and smaller in scale (e.g. Maple Leaf Foods Listeriosis outbreak North York, Ontario - 2008). 

Yes, massively fewer and massively smaller in scale, because we have food inspectors and health inspectors who aren't bribed into silence and who enforce the law.

[bush_cheney2004]

5 hours ago, Argus said:

That is an inane thing to write. By design? They designed China not to be like the West? Seriously? Do you read this stuff after you spit it out?

And managed to lose millions to various calamities, wars and plagues in the process. How nice for them.

 

Now you are getting it....China has been around a lot longer than  Canada....population 1.4 BILLION vs. 36 MILLION.

 

Quote

Why do you put that in quotes? Are you questioning whether China has a totalitarian government? I know you're a big fan of Russia. Are you a big fan of China too?

Then it needs to try harder.

 

The irony here is obvious.

 

Quote

Cite, please.

Yes, massively fewer and massively smaller in scale, because we have food inspectors and health inspectors who aren't bribed into silence and who enforce the law.

 

From 2015:

China has joined Taiwan, Korea, Peru and Belarus in restricting imports of Canadian beef products because of concern over a case of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) found in Alberta.

The Alberta case of BSE — better known as mad cow disease — was confirmed by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency on Feb. 13.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/canadian-beef-restricted-by-china-over-bse-case-1.2976540

[SpankyMcFarland]

A smidgen of credit should be given where it’s due. A few decades ago, China had a GDP per capita similar to many African countries. It has advanced extraordinarily since then but progress has inevitably been uneven. Yes, China is a totalitarian state (with all that entails for tardy reporting of disease outbreaks) and hygiene remains appalling by our standards but the Chinese authorities have reacted more quickly this time than they did to SARS and are taking dramatic steps to contain the epidemic, including building and refitting hospitals on a timescale we can only dream of. Although the Chinese public generally accept their lack of political freedom, they have been more vocal over issues like earthquake preparedness (when you lose your kids in a shoddily built school, what have you left to lose?), pollution and corrupt planning decisions that wipe out communities. In the face of this new challenge, the govt will dearly wish to demonstrate some semblance of competence. 

[Teena]

On 1/25/2020 at 4:28 PM, Argus said:

So once again we have a strange new, mutated virus coming out of China. And once again, rather than dealing with it the Chinese authorities did their best to downplay it and pretend it didn't exist for as long as they could, allowing it to spread far and wide. Once again the source is China's utterly corrupt, horrifically awful food handling system, which has rock bottom sanitation levels all the way through from farms to restaurants. China is so corrupt and so many people care so little for anyone else that some greedy assed company executives replaced ingredients in baby food with cheap crap that killed babies. Where else would people do that?

You want to know all about the care taken with food there? Let's talk about gutter oil. It's the perfect example. Never heard of gutter oil? Gutter oil is 'recycled' cooking oil derived from  restaurant fryers, grease traps, slaughterhouse waste and sewage from sewer drains. Yes, it's illegal, but it's been going on for years, and makes up about 10% of cooking oil in China. All kinds of toxic chemicals are routinely found in Chinese foot and beverages, all designed to save money for the producer. Food handling factories often fail examinations by western companies.

There are horror stories, obviously," Mathieu Labasse, Asia Inspection's vice president told CNN by phone. "We find factories that just have no basic idea about hygiene standards. People that handle the food, they have no gloves, nothing." Labasse said there was a host of reasons for the failings. In some cases, laboratory tests found abnormal levels of pesticides, antibiotics, heavy metals, bacteria or viruses that could put consumers at risk.

 

https://www.cnn.com/2015/01/16/world/china-food-safety/index.html

 

Now, new evidence is emerging that officials in Wuhan deliberately downplayed the virus, even after formally notifying the World Health Organization on Dec. 31 about what the WHO described as “a cluster of cases of pneumonia of unknown cause.”

But the Wuhan government took a “refrigerating strategy” in the early days of the viral spread, a doctor at Wuhan Union Hospital told China News Weekly. Medical staff were banned from speaking publicly about what was taking place or accepting media interviews, the doctor said. Police in Wuhan also said in early January that they had arrested eight people for spreading “rumours” about what was then a little-understood pneumonia affecting a growing number of people.

Another person claiming to be a Wuhan physician wrote to the National Health Commission this week claiming that doctors in the city were told not to report “viral pneumonia” in their imaging reports between Jan. 12 and Jan. 16 — a period during which local officials delivered sunny reports on a local situation under control.

 

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/article-weeks-before-lockdown-wuhan-authorities-used-refrigerating-strategy/

 

So you combine a food system filled with contamination and a government which does its best to hide any issues and you have a perfect storm where viruses can develop, evolve and spread before anyone can do anything about it. One of these days one of these viruses is going to emerge from China and kill the whole damn bunch of us.

 

 

 

Hey Argus, I agree. My daughter visited China 2 years ago for school. She was there for 28 days. She said it is so dirty there. She said you take a shower and you still feel dirty. She said she ate mostly rice because it was so dirty in many places. High pollution. Too many people? Streets are crowded. Makes you wonder about their sewage and waste systems. 

[scribblet]

This is a live food market in China, the conditions are atrocious, how can there not be disease and heaven knows what breeding there.

Why would anyone actually feed live tadpoles to a child - I get that different cultures don't mind eating live food but surely this is not good anyone's system.

 

 

 

[scribblet]

Finally:   For all of these reasons, I am declaring a public health emergency of international concern over the global outbreak of #2019nCoV
https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/who-declares-chinese-coronavirus-a-global-health-emergency-1.4789826

[SpankyMcFarland]

Chinese dietary traditions predate the PRC by a long way and ‘learnings’ will take a nice while too.

Bats deserve much more study. They seem to be able to tolerate viral infections more effectively than most mammals and the longevity of some species is quite extraordinary in view of their size. 
 
 

 

 

 

[cannuck]

I have had the good fortune to watch this and discuss with an epidemiologist.   His opinion is the China is going over the top in response, but you can't trust their information output and methodology enough to really know what is happening (he has a lot of experience in the region).  Based on his counsel, I am not at all upset with Canada's lack of panic in response.

As has been wisely mentioned in this thread: the food and many other practices in China are the result of millenia of engrained behaviour.  To understand this better, one needs to appreciate that within a culture that uses a contextual language, things that SHOULD be obvious from science or read from contracts, etc. are interpreted differently from day to day.   The cultural artifacts of more than 5,000 years of doing things a certain way are far more deeply rooted than logical thought processes.

I am, however, alarmed at how much disruption the business of the entire world is going to suffer over this.  My friend and business associate (now living here) from China is telling me daily of what things will simply come to a complete stop (they are now due to New Year) due to plants not re-opening and people not travelling when things would normally start up after the holiday.

What I DO get a huge laugh from is our idiotic government's continuation of the Huawei debacle.  The Canadians "stranded" in China owe their plight to the Liberals' ineptitude at foreign affairs.

 

[SpankyMcFarland]

Dictatorships are ponderous contraptions. Error control ain’t their strong suit. 
 

Quote

The death of a whistleblowing Chinese doctor who was punished for trying to raise the alarm about coronavirus has sparked an explosion of anger, grief and demands for freedom of speech among ordinary Chinese.

Li Wenliang, 34, died in the early hours of Friday local time after he was infected during the fight against the outbreak, said Wuhan central hospital, where he worked, in a statement.

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/feb/07/coronavirus-chinese-rage-death-whistleblower-doctor-li-wenliang

Edited February 7, 2020 by SpankyMcFarland

[Rue]

On ‎1‎/‎25‎/‎2020 at 4:28 PM, Argus said:

So once again we have a strange new, mutated virus coming out of China. And once again, rather than dealing with it the Chinese authorities did their best to downplay it and pretend it didn't exist for as long as they could, allowing it to spread far and wide. Once again the source is China's utterly corrupt, horrifically awful food handling system, which has rock bottom sanitation levels all the way through from farms to restaurants. China is so corrupt and so many people care so little for anyone else that some greedy assed company executives replaced ingredients in baby food with cheap crap that killed babies. Where else would people do that?

You want to know all about the care taken with food there? Let's talk about gutter oil. It's the perfect example. Never heard of gutter oil? Gutter oil is 'recycled' cooking oil derived from  restaurant fryers, grease traps, slaughterhouse waste and sewage from sewer drains. Yes, it's illegal, but it's been going on for years, and makes up about 10% of cooking oil in China. All kinds of toxic chemicals are routinely found in Chinese foot and beverages, all designed to save money for the producer. Food handling factories often fail examinations by western companies.

There are horror stories, obviously," Mathieu Labasse, Asia Inspection's vice president told CNN by phone. "We find factories that just have no basic idea about hygiene standards. People that handle the food, they have no gloves, nothing." Labasse said there was a host of reasons for the failings. In some cases, laboratory tests found abnormal levels of pesticides, antibiotics, heavy metals, bacteria or viruses that could put consumers at risk.

 

https://www.cnn.com/2015/01/16/world/china-food-safety/index.html

 

Now, new evidence is emerging that officials in Wuhan deliberately downplayed the virus, even after formally notifying the World Health Organization on Dec. 31 about what the WHO described as “a cluster of cases of pneumonia of unknown cause.”

But the Wuhan government took a “refrigerating strategy” in the early days of the viral spread, a doctor at Wuhan Union Hospital told China News Weekly. Medical staff were banned from speaking publicly about what was taking place or accepting media interviews, the doctor said. Police in Wuhan also said in early January that they had arrested eight people for spreading “rumours” about what was then a little-understood pneumonia affecting a growing number of people.

Another person claiming to be a Wuhan physician wrote to the National Health Commission this week claiming that doctors in the city were told not to report “viral pneumonia” in their imaging reports between Jan. 12 and Jan. 16 — a period during which local officials delivered sunny reports on a local situation under control.

 

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/article-weeks-before-lockdown-wuhan-authorities-used-refrigerating-strategy/

 

So you combine a food system filled with contamination and a government which does its best to hide any issues and you have a perfect storm where viruses can develop, evolve and spread before anyone can do anything about it. One of these days one of these viruses is going to emerge from China and kill the whole damn bunch of us.

 

 

 

Its impossible not to connect this phenomena to government practices,  and the wide spread food  practices in China when handling meat not to mention the inherent nature of crowded face to face condensed populations.

The problem is this is going to never end.

 

 

[Minnetonka]

On 1/27/2020 at 7:32 AM, Argus said:

Yes, massively fewer and massively smaller in scale, because we have food inspectors and health inspectors who aren't bribed into silence and who enforce the law.

Yet the factory farms still crank out new viruses and superbugs. We're playing with fire, too, but that's okay cuz it's us.

[Argus]

11 hours ago, Minnetonka said:

Yet the factory farms still crank out new viruses and superbugs. We're playing with fire, too, but that's okay cuz it's us.

The factory farms are  a damned site more careful about contamination than those markets in China. Or anywhere in China, for that matter.

[sidewinder]

I don't trust any country where dog meat  is a staple food!

[Breeze]

Thats true, I think that people should destroy China to save the world in future, I also hate all muslim `culture`, remember my words one day if we will sit like this and do nothing one day all our kids will down a knee to muhammad or what the heck they love