Congress is getting bipartisan support to call for the permanent shutdown of China’s wet markets.

It’s believed that the current coronavirus outbreak started in a wet market in Wuhan, China. Even the 2003 SARS outbreak is also believed to have its origin in China’s wet markets.

According to The Hill,

A group of more than 60 bipartisan lawmakers on Wednesday called for an immediate global ban on live wildlife markets and the international trade of live wildlife over their supposed links to the novel coronavirus outbreak.

In a letter spearheaded by Sens. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) as well as Reps. Michael McCaul (R-Texas) and Mike Quigley (D-Ill.), the lawmakers urged leaders of the World Health Organization (WHO), the World Organization for Animal Health and the United Nations to make the move “to protect public health.”

“It is clear that to protect human health, these close and sustained interactions with wildlife must stop,” the lawmakers wrote, pointing to studies that have linked wet markets where humans interact with live and dead animals as “prime transmission locations” for deadly pathogens.

The wet markets aren’t what you would think when you think of like a meat market here in the U.S. where things are pretty clean and only certain kinds of meat.

In Chinese wet markets, you may find fish, beef, and pork like you would here, but you’ll also find some things that disgusting and unfathomable like dog meat, chicken parts for sell and strewn on the ground, giant salamanders, bats, snakes, and much more.

On top of all of that, the conditions are horrifying as well. You have live animals mixed in with the dead ones, therefore you have feces all over the place. You also have meat being exposed for long periods of time to the outdoor environment without proper refrigeration therefore allowing all kinds of bacteria to latch onto these meats.

I’ve even seen people cleaning animals like fish on the ground where people walk. So you have animals defecating on the ground, people walking through it, and then people cleaning animals on that ground.