Coping with nCoV

Yum yum… maybe you’ve seen the videos.

One is of the woman eating bat soup, with a whole bat staring up like a creature from hell. Either she or the restaurant at least made some effort at presentation, artfully draping the bat on one side of the soup bowl rim.

More importantly, the bat was dead and looked cooked.

Not so the creature in another video clip, which could vie for gross-out video in this coronavirus season. This being the Lunar Year of the Rat, the video shows a man with a plate before him, again artfully laid out with sliced tomatoes and… are those moving baby mice?

Yes, they are. The man picks up one with chopsticks, dips the squirming gray bubwit in what looks like lemon butter sauce, and without hesitation pops the creature into his mouth, chews, and prepares to pick up another one.

Our resident singkit in the newsroom told us it must be a “honey mouse” – nearly bite-size mice fed with honey and eaten just a day or two after birth, although the usual color is white rather than mousy gray. Something similar to our day-old chick, except the day-old chick is of course from hens, and is deep-fried in boiling oil.

The Chinese woman in the bat video has since come out in public – after being bashed on social media for contributing to the transmission of the novel coronavirus – to apologize and clarify that she ate the bat soup in Palau, not China, and it was in 2016.

We’re still waiting for the guy eating the live mice to also come out – although he might see no need, since no one is linking rodents to the novel coronavirus, a.k.a. the 2019-nCoV. His meal venue is believed to be somewhere in China’s Guangdong province.

I’m using a.k.a., a police term, because law enforcement is what comes to mind in describing suspected nCoV cases as PUIs – “persons under investigation.”

You’ll probably feel like a suspect, too, if you are a possible carrier of a virus with the potential to kill you, plus your family, friends and people you touch or who are within range of your sneeze and cough.

That possibility of harming other people should encourage self-reporting as nCoV spreads rapidly with no vaccine as yet available.

It should also encourage people to refrain from what scientists consider to be risky behavior at this point – such as eating exotic animals, especially live.

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We must note that Filipinos also eat bats. Called kabog, the fruit-eating creatures have a wingspan of up to a meter and their torso can weigh about a kilo – much larger than the one in the video. The torso is cut up and thoroughly cooked, with the head and wings not part of the plating.

Field rodents are also eaten here, just like in China and other parts of Asia. But again our rat eaters prefer the animals cooked.

SARS, also from coronavirus, is believed to have originated from civets bought live for food from markets in China. We might sniff at this, but at least the Chinese eat the cat meat. We, on the other hand, eat their poop. OK, more accurately, we drink the pricey coffee processed from the beans that the civets excrete with their poop after they feed on coffee berries. Still…

Snakes – another suspected source of nCoV – are also eaten here, as well as monitor lizards, locusts, dogs, duck embryo, cats in siopao. So we can’t be judgmental about the gustatory delights in other cultures.

But we can refrain from indulging our taste for exotic food – at least until a vaccine is developed and the nCoV threat subsides.

This is one of the pieces of advice given by medical professionals and scientists to the public as the newest coronavirus strain gallops around the planet.

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Contrary to the nCoV “infodemic” of fake news, it’s still OK to eat sashimi, and I guess the Koreans can safely nosh on live baby octopus. With seafood, only the usual precautions are needed: it must be fresh and properly cleaned.

Wildlife is a different issue. You don’t know where bats and civets have been or what they’ve eaten. Handling them alive and then slaughtering and preparing them for cooking can facilitate “zoonotic transmission” – the transfer of pathogens from animal to human.

This is according to microbiologist and infectious disease specialist Raul Destura, deputy director of the Philippine Genome Center at the University of the Philippines in Diliman.

“Anything that is (eaten raw), you bypass the process of heat,” Destura told “The Chiefs” this week on Cignal TV’s One News. “The sterilization process is not there.”

So hold the bat soup and squirming honey mouse, for now.

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Other precautions that people can take against killer pathogens, according to Destura and health professionals, are basic hygiene practices: regular hand washing with soap and water, observing sneezing and coughing etiquette, and keeping oneself clean.

There’s a photo also going around of an advisory supposedly from the World Health Organization. At the bottom of a to-do list it advises: “Avoid unprotected sex with live wild or farm animals.”

It’s a measure of the panic over nCoV that there are people who wonder if the advisory is authentic, considering that there are nutcases who engage in bestiality.

The panic is certain to increase following the confirmation of the Philippines’ first nCoV case yesterday and the death of one of those being tested for the virus.

Albay 2nd District Rep. Joey Salceda, who is proposing the creation of a Center for Disease Control and Prevention, cautions against “silliness” and overreactions to the threat.

Salceda told The Chiefs that going to health centers over the most minor symptoms could overwhelm facilities. He has a point, but this must be reconciled with Destura’s call for civic responsibility in “self-reporting” for those who believe they are possible nCoV carriers.

With no end to the deaths and with the infection numbers rising by about 1,000 a day in China alone – a much faster rate than SARS – it’s becoming harder to draw the line between silliness and prudence in responding to the nCoV threat.

In my case, I’ve got my ordinary facemask, and I’m skipping kilawin.