Orville Taylor | Chinavirus: A real scare

It was a mainland Chinese friend when I was a graduate student who laughed over the fact that Jamaicans were such finicky eaters. He joked we ate animal faecal sacs, cow tails, bull penis soup, cow skin, goat and pig heads, yet we found it strange that they ate everything with legs except furniture.

We all made derisive quips about the palates of our oriental friends who were stereotyped as having a penchant for canine meat. Yet all boys of all races, ethnicities and skin colour who went to the Chinese-acculturated St George’s College I attended ate many Chinese things, including chun pee mui dried plums, sow bow, fortune cookies and highly suspect patties.

Indeed, one of the things which bond us boys of STGC with those of Kingston College of the 1970s to 1980s is this common fear and acceptance that we consumed something which had a bark but was not a tree.

My anthropology training gives me the admonition in John 8:7 about casting first stone and the slap from Matthew 7:5 about speck in my neighbour’s eyes versus my own log in mine. Worse, if one can eat rabbit, pigs, sea scavenger crab, shrimp and lobster as well as a big nasty sea snail, then snake is quite fine. Still, sucking on a fat bat or conch from the shell are frontiers I can’t cross.

Yet, it is no longer a private ethnic or cultural matter when there are global health consequences. And this is the case with this new threat to global safety; this coronavirus, described in some quarters as the ‘chinavirus’.

Early reports suggest that it might have originated in the habit of eating bats in some parts of China and there is a video of a woman gorging on one of these flying mammals. Beyond the hysteria, there seems to be some confirmation that the virus is a very recently mutated one, which made the jump from bats to us not long ago. The virus might be airborne and lives for a long time on surfaces. Cooking the bat as long as we cook pork still wouldn’t have stopped the epidemic.

A LARGE FAMILY

Now, there are all kinds of conspiracies and one cannot simply rule them out. For example, there is the caution that on the label of two popular household cleaners is a list of microbes which they can kill within 99 per cent surety.

And right there in writing as tiny as a hypocrite’s mind we see ‘human coronavirus’ bunched up in company with a long list of other germs.

However, the coronaviruses is a rather large family of germs. Other relatives in this group include those which cause around 15 to 30 per cent of all colds and other respiratory infections. The first coronavirus was identified just around the start of World War II. It caused a major epidemic among chicken and other domestic poultry. Other varieties infect mice, horses and other domestic mammals, as well.

By the way, most mammals have more than 80 per cent of the same DNA as humans. Thus, it is not unusual though not very common for viruses to mutate and cross over from one species to another. Oftentimes, it is because of poor managing of hygiene protocols and on occasions it might be a strange spin on animal husbandry where the boundaries between man and beast are too close.

Whatever might have been the prompt, this version of the virus, the 2019-nCoV, according to scientists, seemed to have originated from one source. In fact, among 10 randomly chosen victims, there was 99.98 sharing of the same genetic sequence.

As with most viruses, there is no cure. However, many people naturally recover after treating symptoms and maintaining healthy practices and diets.

What is scary, though, is that it has moved so fast from a tiny epicentre in Wuhan province, incidentally where around 31 Jamaican students live, that within a few weeks, it has infected thousands and taken many lives. This thing has literally spread as fast a wildfire.

On January 21, 2020, there were 309 reported cases. By January 25, the number leapt to 1,298, to more than double to 2,745 by January 27. Apparently doubling every two days, 5,970 victims were recorded on January 29 and by month end the number was just short of 10,000. More than 200 persons have died and that is just in China.

PERSONAL PRECAUTIONS

I have deep concerns about the Jamaicans there, because I am advised that the medical personnel have vacated the health facilities near where they live. The best advice I am told they have received is ‘do not get sick’. More powerful countries such as the USA and UK have moved their people out. But in a country where travel is restricted, they just have to ride out the storm.

The virus not only moves fast, but it infects and sleeps in the host for one to two weeks before it starts his ravaging pneumonia-type onslaught on the body. It is almost like a retrovirus or a spy, who you take into your confidence. Therefore, all those thermometer tests at ports of entry really mean nothing.

Inasmuch as the trip from the far east and other places where travellers frequent China are long and can take days, there is no way that a person who picks it up two days before boarding for home will show any more symptoms than the loose bowels triggered by trepidation.

On Thursday, January 30, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a global health emergency. All of this is happening so fast that there are many of us, present company included, who are exhibiting diarrhoea symptoms, totally unrelated to the actual infection. Honestly, not even the earthquake has scared me so much.

Yet, panic is the last thing that we have to do. Jamaicans are the most ‘scornful’ people I know. So I am hoping just plain anti-nastiness practices kick in.

In the meantime, let us each personally take precautions in our own spaces.

- Dr Orville Taylor is head of the Department of Sociology at the UWI, a radio talk-show host, and author of ‘Broken Promises, Hearts and Pockets’. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and tayloronblackline@hotmail.com