I had planned on going through my files of things I've read and copied on the topic of epidemic and pandemic diseases that make the leap from farm animals to human to human transmission but the list would be very long so I just chose these few examples and decided to give some excerpts, not that it will change the meat head champions of, um, "science" and uh, "reason" and, . . . .yeah, "evidence based thinking." Don't even believe for a second that they'll read them, they don't read, they spew stupidity and mutual admiration.
One Root Cause of Pandemics Few People Think About
It’s our seemingly insatiable desire to eat meat
By Paul Shapiro on March 24, 2020
It’s easy for those of us in the Western world to shake our heads at the live wildlife markets in China that appear to be the origin of the coronavirus pandemic now paralyzing the globe. Easy, that is, since such a practice is so literally quite foreign to us. (In their defense, at least, China has now banned such markets.)
But what’s more difficult is to be honest with ourselves about what kinds of pandemics we may be brewing through own risky animal-use practices. And while the new coronavirus, crippling as it is, might have a somewhat merciful case fatality rate (proportion of those infected who die) of less than 1 percent, we know that this catastrophe may be just a dress rehearsal for an even more serious pandemic that could take a more gruesome toll—akin to the 1918 global flu pandemic, which originated in Kansas and killed at least 50 million people.
When that day comes, it’s very likely that such a virus will also have its origin in humanity’s seemingly insatiable desire to eat animals, whether wild or domestic. The conditions in which we often farm animals today—crowding tens of thousands of animals wing-to-wing or snout-to-snout—serve as “amplifiers” for viral pandemics.
Indeed, the H1N1 swine flu outbreak of 2009 appears to have originated in a pig confinement operation in North Carolina. And while the H5N1 bird flu outbreak in 1997 evidently originated in Chinese chicken farms (case fatality rate 60 percent), a similar bird flu in the U.S. just five years ago led American poultry farmers to kill tens of millions of their birds to contain the outbreak, which thankfully never made the jump into the human population. And at this very moment, both India and China have announced bird flu outbreaks among their chicken factories. Similarly, these are not yet affecting human health.
Factory Farms: A Hotspot for Emerging Pandemics
By Scott Weathers
US Global Health Policy
Last week, the World Health Organization elected Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus as its next Director General. Amid his controversial campaign, I coauthored an open letter to the next Director General to prioritize factory farming, an eminent threat to global health. This letter, signed by over 200 experts in relevant fields, attracted a large degree of media attention in the New York Times, Lancet, Guardian, Huffington Post, and elsewhere. The announcement of this letter on Twitter was the top trending post on nearly all relevant hashtags for the World Health Assembly, even during its busiest day.
Factory farming, in its simplest definition, is the intense, large-scale confinement of animals in order to produce meat. The vast majority of meat consumed in the United States, and increasingly in Low-Income Countries, is produced in this manner. Perhaps the most terrifying risks of factory farms are to global health security, which manifest themselves in two major ways.
Livestock infectious diseases and zoonoses
Fiona M. Tomley* and Martin W. Shirley
Infectious diseases of livestock are a major threat to global animal health and welfare and their effective control is crucial for agronomic health, for safeguarding and securing national and international food supplies and for alleviating rural poverty in developing countries. Some devastating livestock diseases are endemic in many parts of the world and threats from old and new pathogens continue to emerge, with changes to global climate, agricultural practices and demography presenting conditions that are especially favourable for the spread of arthropod-borne diseases into new geographical areas. Zoonotic infections that are transmissible either directly or indirectly between animals and humans are on the increase and pose significant additional threats to human health and the current pandemic status of new influenza A (H1N1) is a topical example of the challenge presented by zoonotic viruses. In this article, we provide a brief overview of some of the issues relating to infectious diseases of livestock, which will be discussed in more detail in the papers that follow.
Keywords: emerging infectious diseases, livestock and zoonotic pathogens, vector-borne diseases, global impact, food security.
Building a factory farmed future, one pandemic at a time
by GRAIN
GRAIN began working on global livestock diseases in 2006, when we launched a report on the global bird flu pandemic. That report punched a hole in the accepted wisdom, promoted by meat companies and international agencies, that the disease was mainly being spread by wild birds and backyard farms. It exposed the rapid rise of factory farms in Asia as the likely source of this highly pathogenic virus, and the global meat industry as the principal conduit for its spread. We wanted to help the small farmers and wet market traders challenge the punitive measures that they were being unfairly subjected to, and to push for an effective global response to the disease that would also prevent the industrial meat system from producing more such lethal diseases. Unfortunately this has, for the most part, not happened, and more outbreaks have occurred, notably the swine flu outbreak in Mexico in 2009. Sadly, our investigations into today's ASF pandemic read like a déja vu of the work we began over a decade ago.
Some of GRAIN's reports on livestock diseases:
Fowl play: The poultry industry's central role in the bird flu crisis, 2006: https://grain.org/e/22
Viral times - The politics of emerging global animal diseases, 2008: https://grain.org/e/614
A food system that kills - Swine flu is meat industry's latest plague, 2009: https://grain.org/e/189
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