Well, that's all very disturbing. I only know of our buddy Lin-fa because you started a book about him!

Those associations do indeed raise red flags. I've always felt that the whole notion that there's an increasing risk of animal to human transmission is backwards. I think it's decreasing for a number of reasons.

First, the percentage of people having direct contact with wild animals is decreasing hourly. Consider that just a couple hundred years ago, most everybody, literally, would be in some form a daily physical contact with wild animals beyond insects. Today, even in developing countries, that percentage is falling off very quickly.

Also, as we're reminded constantly, we're already into, what is it, the 5th great extinction? We're losing species daily. It just doesn't make sense to me that there should be some explosion of animal to human viral transmission.

And yet that's what we're being told with alarming headlines like this one from the article you shared: New Langya virus found in China could be 'tip of the iceberg'.

I got a kick from this quote:

"We are hugely underestimating the number of these zoonotic cases in the world, and this (Langya virus) is just the tip of the iceberg," said emerging virus expert Leo Poon, a professor at the University of Hong Kong's School of Public Health, who was not involved in the latest study.

Well of course Leo is going to say that. If you're an emerging virus 'expert', you want the world to see it as you do, one big viral soup, and if everyone believes, really believes, and fears, well, that's great for business and those huge grants! He might even get interviewed on CNN!

It's also a funny quote because it's ambiguous. Is he emerging as an expert of viruses, or an expert of emerging viruses? I suspect both, and since he's emerging, he's super eager. I mean, he may have been in the field a long time, but he's not a household name yet like Fauci, and surely that's what he aspires to be, a household name with international fame.