boost: Absolutely Disgusting: Wet Markets, Stigma Theory, and Xenophobia

[jesse_the_k]

Another fascinating essay from nursingclio_feed explores how anti-Asian racism builds on stigma, as per Goffman.

But targeting wet markets as the source of future pandemics obscures the complexity of changing human-wildlife relationships in the 21st century and their role in disease emergence. Anthropogenic changes to the environment including industrial and residential development, habitat disruption and destruction, and agricultural practices introduce new opportunities for pathogens to jump from one species into another. Wet markets that feature many different wildlife in the same space provide one opportunity for such species jumps to occur, but so do logging, mining, road construction, and rapid urban growth. Zoonotic diseases may emerge from interactions between fruit bats and pig farms in Malaysia, as in the case of the Nipah virus, or alongside residential development in the formerly forested suburbs of Connecticut, like Lyme disease. Exclusively focusing on wet markets and coronavirus ignores the history and reality of disease ecology.

https://nursingclio.org/2020/06/02/absolutely-disgusting-wet-markets-stigma-theory-and-xenophobia

Comments

[monanotlisa]

So true -- it's not just "Chinese wet markets"; it's all countries' encroachment into natural spaces and the increasing cross-species exposure.