A number of restaurants in the city of Manado in North Sulawesi, Indonesia are reported to have stopped selling the bat dishes typical in the region, paniki.
The measure was taken following news that the spread of the coronavirus was thought to originate from bats.
Nicolina Pelealu, one of the Minahasan restaurant owner who serves bat menu, claimed that she immediately withdrew all the menus from the four branches of her restaurant in Manado because she did not want to take risks.
"It's not about whether there's a virus or not, I worry that because of business competition, then suddenly there are rumours to put us down, because we still sell paniki (bat)," she said as quoted by Kumparan.com. "So, I decided to take it off the menu."
Meanwhile before, the government of the city of Tomohon - a city South of Manado - reportedly did not prohibit the sale of bats even though they gave the advice.
"What we are doing is giving an advice to reduce to temporarily eliminate the sale of animals alleged as the cause of the coronavirus," said Head of the Regional Trade and Industry Office, Tomohon City, Ruddy A. Lengkong last week.
The local government said that it would be difficult to ban the bat trade because the sale had been done long before the outbreak of this virus, and so far there have not been found positive cases of the coronavirus.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) has declared the novel coronavirus outbreak a global emergency. Virus that has symptoms similar to flu is said to originate from the wild animals trading, including bats, in China.
“I have 90% confidence it is a bat-borne virus,” says Linfa Wang, head of the emerging infectious disease program at Duke-National University of Singapore Medical School, as reported by Bloomberg.
One of his colleagues at the Wuhan Institute of Virology found that the new coronavirus is more than 96% genetically identical to a bat virus from the Yunnan province in the southern China.
