The way people eat all around the world — including in the US — is a major risk factor for pandemics, too.
Some experts have hypothesized that the novel coronavirus made the jump from animals to humans in China’s wet markets, just like SARS before it. Unsurprisingly, many people are furious that the markets, which were closed in the immediate wake of the outbreak in China, are already reopening.
It’s easy to point the finger at these “foreign” places and blame them for
generating pandemics. But doing that ignores one crucial fact: The way
people eat all around the world — including in the US — is a major risk
factor for pandemics, too.
That’s because we eat a ton of meat, and the vast majority of it comes from
factory farms. In these huge industrialized facilities that supply more than
90 percent of meat globally — and around 99 percent of America’s meat —
animals are tightly packed together and live under harsh and unsanitary
conditions.
“When we overcrowd animals by the thousands, in cramped football-field-size
sheds, to lie beak to beak or snout to snout, and there’s stress crippling
their immune systems, and there’s ammonia from the decomposing waste burning
their lungs, and there’s a lack of fresh air and sunlight — put all these
factors together and you have a perfect-storm environment for the emergence
and spread of disease,“ said Michael Greger, the author of Bird Flu: A Virus
of Our Own Hatching.
To make matters worse, selection for specific genes in farmed animals (for
desirable traits like large chicken breasts) has made these animals almost
genetically identical. That means that a virus can easily spread from animal
to animal without encountering any genetic variants that might stop it in
its tracks. As it rips through a flock or herd, the virus can grow even more
virulent.
Greger puts it bluntly: “If you actually want to create global pandemics, then build factory farms.”
COWSPIRACY: The Sustainability Secret available online
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