re: birds likely cause of future pandemic For a virulent virus seeking to jump from animals to humans China's Guangdong province may be the perfect habitat.
Along the highways, ubiquitous farms are lined up next to each other, with farmers tending their ducks, chickens, and pigs in teeming and cramped quarters. In the city's food stalls, meanwhile, vendors keep their meat—alive and dead—in cages and baskets stacked on top of each other. Customers can choose from a menu of rats, cats, dogs, frogs, snakes, and exotic birds.
Many wild and exotic animals are sold as food in China, such as these racoons in stacked cages at the Qingping Market in Guangzhou. Some scientists warn that such conditions are ideal for a virus to jump from animals to humans, which likely happened in the case of SARS.
In such unhygienic conditions, scientists have long warned, it's just a matter of time before a hidden and potentially lethal virus would make the leap from animal to man. It should come as no surprise, then, that one virus—the enigmatic coronavirus that causes severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS—in all likelihood did.
China has an unfortunate history of producing new viral strains. Two devastating influenza pandemics, in 1957 and 1968, both originated in China, each killing more than a million people. Experts maintain that outdated farming practices, overpopulation, and even political secrecy may be to blame.
"Ducks can pass avian flu viruses to pigs, where two viruses can mingle and form a new strain that is passed on to the farmers. The pigs, which have a genetic make-up similar to humans, act as the "mixing vessels."
Eurasian avian influenza viruses have been recognized as the precursors to the influenza virus genes that re-assorted with human strains to generate the 1957 and 1968 flu pandemics.
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