As the new coronavirus begins to spread, nowhere in the press do I see any discussion about why China has become and continues to be a breeding ground for these viruses. China, with a population four times greater than America's, is unable to feed itself and has become dependent of foreign imports of food to fuel its economic development. Its vulnerability is to be seen in the latest round of tariff negociations. This new, more economically pragmatic model of communism has projected the country into almost superstar status. In the countryside, however, old style habits die hard and though property ownership reforms have taken place in urban areas and created a new successful middle class, the reform of land ownership because of its history has remained stagnant. Old practices have lingered on. The right of peasant farmers to own small plots of land has not enabled the Chinese to create viable agricultural units which can produce food economically and in sufficient quantity to feed itself.

The government's solution whereby farmers rent their land has not been successful, so the old peasant practices dating back thousands of years have lingered. The worst of those practices is to use human excrement as fertilizer. After all, if horse, cow and chicken dung are used as fertilizer, as they have been in the West for generations, why not human? The answer is that our bacteria are different. We know that human excreta has to be neutralized to make it safe to be put back into the food chain. We all live in a sea of bacteria. Bacteria form a major part of our bodies. The interaction of bacteria form the building blocks of life and our defenses against infection.

By treating sewage, human bacteria do not get the opportunity to go off and be exposed and enter other animals in the food chain. Directly recirculating our bacteria allows for all sorts of strange pathogens and viruses to emerge. That's how nature works. A rodent eating the worm from the soil around the plant fertilized with our fecal matter, gets exposed to human bacteria and its own system reacts accordingly. Any viruses in the mouse learn to cope with the new bacteria. Viruses and bacteria interact. The interactions between bacteria and viruses are known about but not particularly well. Our mouse may get eaten by a civet cat which processes the mouse's bacteria along with the viruses and if the said civet cat is then eaten by a human in Wuhan, a mutated virus gets an opportunity to re-enter the human system. Somewhere in the virus' DNA code it retains the knowledge to infect humans.

My knowledge of epidemiology is basic but given that the majority of flu viruses have come from China, the process should look pretty obvious even to laymen. Thankfully China has trained scientists and doctors and the government learned from the last Sars outbreak but continuing to use human excrement as a fertilizer is not a good idea for the survival of mankind. The Chinese countryside is a petri dish of possible pathogens waiting for opportunities. The American government needs to pressure the Chinese government to reform its agricultural practices and the laws on land ownership. We all need to be on our guard. When the Black Death in the 14th century removed a third of the European population, the disease spread relatively slowly because transportation was by foot and horse. A modern day virus can now pop on a plane and reach just about anywhere fairly easily within days. From the virus' point of view this must be bit must be like sticking its hand in a extremely large candy jar. An ignorant population is a vulnerable one.