At a point back in my distant youth, during a microbiology lab test vital to my labors to earn a degree in biology, my fellow examinees and I were presented with a question which was hypothesized to be extracted from the sigmoid colon of our professor.
Question: Provide several examples of zoonosis, and delineate the stages of development integral to the transmission for one of the examples you cited.
Very well, then. Upon reaching the exam station where this question was presented, a classmate of mine leaped up onto the lab table with a large wooden spoon he obtained from a nearby storage drawer. He then proceeded to perform a mime depicting his digging something from the deep recesses of his posterior. That was the only plausible source for this question. Such a question is analogous to asking, "Why is there air?" To which the only appropriate answer is, "Have you ever tried to breathe Cool Whip?" But alas, I stray.
As we were instructed during the post-exam damage assessment, zoonosis is any disease that is transmitted from an animal to a human. And in the present time, with the occurrence of the 2019 novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV), we have a classic zoonosis. The frolic of my lab test of 1975 meets 2020 reality.
Making an oblique reference to my geology training, the epicenter of the 2019-nCoV outbreak is a "wet market" in Wuhan, China.
Wet markets are utterly foreign to those of us in the U.S. At the risk of duplication, I direct your attention to this photographically descriptive article from Business Insider. Wet markets are congested stalls, selling and butchering live and non-live animals, and other foods in a manner that put people and living and dead animals - dogs, chickens, rabbits, pigs, snakes, civets, and other exotic critters - in close contact which makes zoonosis possible.
Zoonosis.
FYI, I failed to get that question right.
