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The outbreaks of both the Wuhan coronavirus and SARS started in Chinese wet markets. Photos show what the markets look like.

A coronavirus that originated in Wuhan, China , has killed 17 people and infected more than 544.

china wet market
  • The Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan is thought to be the starting point for the virus outbreak. It was shuttered on January 1.
  • At wet markets, meat is sold alongside live animals like dogs, hares, and civets.
  • On Wednesday, Wuhan authorities banned the trade of live animals at wet markets to lower the risk of a disease outbreak.
  • Here's what these markets look like.
  • Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories .

The coronavirus spreading in China and the SARS outbreak of 2003 have two things in common: Both are from the coronavirus family, and both started in wet markets.

At such markets, outdoor stalls are squeezed together to forming narrow lanes, where locals and visitors shop for cuts of meat and ripe produce. A stall selling hundreds of caged chickens may abut a butcher counter, where uncooked meat is chopped as nearby dogs watch hungrily. Vendors hock skinned hares, while seafood stalls display glistening fish and shrimp.

Wet markets put people and live and dead animals dogs, chickens, pigs, snakes, civets, and more in constant, close contact. That makes it easy for a virus to jump from animal to human.

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On Wednesday, authorities in Wuhan, China where the current outbreak started banned the trade of live animals at wet markets. The specific market where the outbreak began, the Huanan Seafood Market, was shuttered on January 1. The coronavirus that emerged there has so far killed 17 people and infected nearly 550.

"When you bring animals together in these unnatural situations, you have the risk of human diseases emerging," Kevin Olival, a disease ecologist and conservationist at the EcoHealth Alliance, told National Geographic . "If the animals are housed in bad conditions under a lot of stress, it might create a better opportunity for them to shed virus and to be sick."

Coronaviruses are zoonotic diseases, meaning they first spread to people from animals. In the case of SARS, and likely this Wuhan coronavirus outbreak as well, bats were the original hosts. The bats then infected other animals, which transmitted the virus to humans.

Here's what Chinese wet markets look like.

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NOEL CELIS/AFP via Getty Images

A 61-year-old man was the first person to die from the virus. According to Bloomberg , he was a regular shopper at the Huanan wet market, which sold more than seafood.

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Teh Eng Koon/AFP via Getty

Wet markets like Huanan are common around China.

David Wong/South China Morning Post/Getty

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Police in Wuhan began conducting checks to enforce the rule among the city's roughly 11 million residents, the BBC reported , citing state media reports.

Teh Eng Koon/AFP/Getty

"One intervention, which is fairly simple, is just reducing the wildlife trade and cleaning up the wildlife markets," Olival told National Geographic . "Cutting back the wildlife trade has a win-win effect of both protecting species that are harvested from the wild and of reducing spillover of new viruses."

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Felix Wong/South China Morning Post/Getty

Between 2002 and 2004, SARS killed 774 people across 29 countries. It originated in Guangdong's wet markets.

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Oleksandr Rupeta/NurPhoto/Getty

But the civets weren't the original hosts of the disease.

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De Agostini/Getty

"Coronaviruses like SARS circulate in bats , and every so often they get introduced into the human population," Vincent Munster, a virologist at the Rocky Mountain Laboratories, told Business Insider.

Bats can pass along viruses in their poop: If they drop feces onto a piece of fruit that a civet then eats, the civet can become a disease carrier.

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Romeo Ranoco/Reuters

"There's an indication that it's a bat virus, spread in association with wet markets," Munster said. "But we don't know which animal species is the amplifier, or intermediate host."

Thomas Brown

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Scientists in China have figured out the genetic code of the Wuhan coronavirus. When researchers compared it to other coronaviruses, they found it to be most similar to two bat coronavirus samples from China.

But further analysis revealed that the genetic building blocks of the Wuhan coronavirus more closely resemble that of snakes. According to the researchers, the only way to be sure of where the virus came from is to take DNA samples from animals sold at the Huanan market and from wild snakes and bats in the area.

In Pictures Ltd./Corbis/Getty

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According to the World Health Organization, people caught those bird flus via direct contact with infected poultry in China. The diseases killed a collective 1,000 people globally.

Dickson Lee/South China Morning Post/Getty

"Because these viruses have not been circulating in humans before, specific immunity to these viruses is absent in humans," Haagmans told Business Insider.

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K. Y. Cheng/South China Morning Post/Getty

These pandemics "are more likely to originate in the Far East because of the close contact with live animals [and] the density of the population," Hyzler added. His firm offers risk-management solutions for global travelers.

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Isaac Lawrence/AFP/Getty

Since December, 544 cases of the Wuhan coronavirus have been reported across six countries, including the US. Symptoms include sore throats, headaches, and fevers, as well as pneumonia-like breathing difficulties.

Haagmans said one of the challenges in containing this outbreak is that a substantial portion of infected people show only mild symptoms.

These individuals "may go unnoticed in tracing the virus and fuel the outbreak," he said, adding, "it seems that this actually may be the case now."

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Aria Bendix contributed reporting to this story.

See Also:

SEE ALSO: Wuhan, China, is about to be quarantined as the coronavirus outbreak grows. The city has 3 million more residents than New York City.

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