The Animal Connection

Here, at the epicentre of the disease known as SARS, dinner can be bought live at a 8216;8216;wet market8217;8217;. Just outside the ban...

Here, at the epicentre of the disease known as SARS, dinner can be bought live at a 8216;8216;wet market8217;8217;. Just outside the banking and commercial centre of the capital of Guangdong Province stretches a wide, congested boulevard lined with machine shops, auto parts vendors and industrial parts outlets. Delivery trucks, lumbering buses and darting taxis vie for position. Nestled amid the enterprises is Chau Tau market.

Here, restaurant chefs and home gourmets, even traditional medicine makers, shop for exotic live animals, the much-desired delicacies of Cantonese cuisine. Guangdong is known for its consumption of snakes, turtles, a range of birds, assorted rodents and wild mammals, even cats and dogs.

Science has long recognised zoonosis 8212; animal-to-human disease spread 8212; and that possibility is under study in the SARS outbreak. But the range of animal possibilities is vast 8212; beyond even those arrayed in markets such as Chau Tau.

8216;8216;In Chinese 8212; Cantonese, really 8212; the list of available meat is enormous. More than 40 species, at least. And markets are there, with live animals. So zoonosis is common here.8217;8217;

There is, of course, no way to know if this market, or others like it, could have been the source of the virus. 8216;8216;Right now we don8217;t know,8217;8217; WHO8217;s Dr. Henk Bekedam said in Beijing. 8216;8216;It is important to know where it came from. We have been invited to Guangdong to hunt for where it came from.8217;8217;

The virus that causes SARS is novel. And that novelty argues that the microbe is not found in animals that come in contact with humans, such as pets and livestock. Guangzhou doesn8217;t seem a likely place to find people and wild animals living in close proximity.

The Chau Tau market is an open-air warehouse space. Animal dealers lounge about, while the animals wiggle, claw and writhe in cages, red plastic tubs of water or mesh bags on the concrete floor. The air is redolent of urine and feces of dozens of species, and humans.

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When the stench can no longer be tolerated, a large power hose is used to wash the filth away, effectively aerosolising much of the muck into breathable droplets.

If such a wet market had a role in that initial illness, the possibility would have been magnified in such an indoor setting. Shoppers are known to frequent such markets, at that time of year to buy furry mammals. For it is widely believed in the Cantonese area that eating furry animals warms a person in winter and wards off disease, particularly pneumonia.