Follow the advice - stay at home, wash your hands regularly - save lives.
{... I've put the second half of this entry behind a cut because it discusses misinformation that has been spread, and also discusses xenophobic myths, and makes reference to both the slaughter of animals, and cannibalism.....................................]
There’s
also a lot of misinformation being put
about online about the causes of the virus, all carried along largely on an
undercurrent of right wing and aggressively nationalist sentiment. Notably of the 20 accounts on Twitter I found
to be spreading this kind of material – less than 20 per cent were based in the
UK. Others making sweeping statements
about immigration and immigrants being to blame for the cases in Spain and
Italy were tweeting from Australia, America, and India respectively. There were two common trends – claiming that
groups from one religion or another were deliberately trying to spread the
virus (which displays a lack of understanding about virology, biological
weapons, and terrorism), and that the virus came from people in the Far East eating
bats. This, untrue, statement is part of
a classic strand of racism and xenophobia based around cultural issues around
food. It is part of a well worn set of
urban legends – all either completely or largely untrue. It is true that the centre of the first reported
cases were centred on a livestock market – however bats were not the livestock
being sold. There is a chance that this
is simply a misunderstanding of the statement that it is believed that this virus
first appeared in bats – which is one of the existing theories – and that the rest
of the detail, that it spread from bats to another species before making the
jump into humans, was lost. In reality
though it is in all likelihood just the continuation of racial stereotypes. Similar comments about ‘foreign’ food have a
long history – even though some have subsided with time and greater exposure to
other cultures. The argument often made
by the people who spread this is based on the idea that food standards in ‘the
West’ are higher – however this misses out numerous issues with food production
in this country which have been detailed by investigative reporting for
decades. One only has to read more deeply
into issues around BSE (Bovine Spongiform
Encephalopathy), which has recurred in the USA as a result of inadequate
testing. BSE is a prion disease, and is
believed to cause Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakub Disease (vCJD) in humans if carried
through the food chain. Prion diseases in
humans include both vCJD, ‘standard’ Creutzfeld-Jakub Disease (CJD), and Kuru (a
Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathy (TSE) which has been subject of extensive
study since its frequent (for an otherwise incredibly rare disease) occurrence amongst
the Fore tribe in Papua New Guinea was believed to be the result of the tribe
having previously practised mortuary cannibalism – though the exact facts
around this are a matter of fierce debate.
It is worth noting however that the transmission of prion diseases in
this way is valid – and is also how BSE spread since meat by products from slaughtered
cows, including unhealthy animals, were commonly added to feed as supplementary
proteins in Europe prior to the 1990s BSE crisis). The USA has however minimally enforced testing
which became standard in Europe after the crisis – and in some cases testing
has been blocked.
The concern
here is that the spread of misinformation, is also becoming allied, in some
quarters, with xenophobic sentiment, at a time when solidarity with our fellow
humans is more important than ever.
