April 5, 2020 The Los Angeles Times ran a front page story about wet markets in China and authorities not enforcing bans, much, allowing supplies to flow into human society. Law enforcement is not perfect in China. That State would put me in jail for writing that. However, supplies of bats (prime source for coronavirus), bear bile (from pandas?), and feces from many species of animals are sold. Those wholesome ingredients are used to concoct potions, magic powders, dime doses and secret sauces. Humm, humm, Good! There are cures for tummy ache, head ache and crotch rot.
I believed and hoped that when China had its 1949 revolution, scientific socialism of Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, V.I. Lenin and others did away with quaint remedies that had survived since prehistoric times. Many of these contents were removed from the civilized worlds millennia ago. The Arabs and other Semites were very good at identifying and using what was good for human beings. When witches used insect parts, eye of newt, fat of don, breath of rush, they were correctly burned at the stake.
But apparently not in China where market medicines are big business. It’s a bad, disgusting, dirty business. Can anyone in the world think of China when these practices are sanctioned and promoted: Money is to be made while everyone, everywhere, gets sick and some die.
In 1906 Upton Sinclair wrote about a man dropping into a vat of grinding meat in a plant. Americans were outraged. The National government created the Food and Drug Administration. I don’t know if my great-grandfather or my grandfather ate any of the meat processed at the plant described in The Jungle. It may be why I don’t feel well today. Sinclair always ran for Governor of California in 1934, as a socialist. He lost. Yet The Jungle endures.
Is it time for China to come into the Twenty-First Century, and end its support and sponsorship of prehistoric medicine?
muymue 