The Chinese government has permanently banned some of the wildlife markets suspected to be at the center of the COVID-19 pandemic. Will factory farms be next?.... The pattern is sobering: the human quest for meat functions as a key driver of the emergence of deadly infectious diseases that kill countless human and nonhuman animals.
Aitor
Garmendia/Tras los Muros
In 1865, German chancellor Otto von Bismarck challenged one of his
critics to a duel. It was left to the critic, a pathologist with an
understanding of the disease links between humans and farmed animals, to
select the arms. His weapon of choice? Meat—a pork sausage for himself, and
for Bismarck, a pork sausage infected with the potentially lethal parasite
Trichinella. The pathologist won by default. Bismarck recognized the power
of the weapon wielded against him and declined the contest.
Bismarck is not the only one to have been defeated by meat. Last month the
Chinese government, finally aware that the wildlife trade’s exorbitant costs
have far exceeded its profits, has likewise opted to back away from
potentially lethal meat by issuing a permanent ban on the consumption and
trade of wild animals. Unfortunately, the ban has come too late. The novel
coronavirus, with its suspected source in bats, via pangolins, is believed
to have emerged at one of China’s wild animal markets. COVID-19, the acute
respiratory disease caused by the virus, has spread around the globe,
killing thousands, infecting hundreds of thousands, and costing the global
economy trillions.
China’s wild animal markets have long been identified as optimal sites for
the emergence of zoonotic viruses with pandemic potential. Stressed animals,
immunologically compromised and crowded together in unhygienic conditions,
create ideal conditions for the propagation of disease. Activities related
to the captivity, handling, transport, slaughter, and consumption of those
animals enable diseases to jump to humans. That is precisely what transpired
with the 2003 SARS epidemic that infected over 8,000 people, killed 774, and
cost the global economy an estimated $40 billion. Civet cats at a wildlife
market in Guangdong were identified as the likely vector for transmission of
the SARS virus to humans. COVID-19 has already far exceeded the toll of the
2003 SARS outbreak, in both lives and dollars.
SARS and COVID-19 are but two of a series of infectious diseases that have
emerged in the human pursuit of meat. Ebola, which has claimed over 13,000
human lives since 2014, has been traced to fruit bats and primates butchered
for food. In 1998, the Nipah virus jumped to humans from fruit bats via
intensively farmed pigs in Malaysia and killed over half of the humans
infected. Measles, responsible for the deaths of millions since its
emergence in antiquity, is believed to have originated from a virus in sheep
and goats that spilled over to the human population through the process of
domestication. HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, was first identified in
chimpanzees in West Africa in 1989, and jumped to humans likely through the
hunting, butchering, and/or consumption of HIV-infected primates. AIDS, to
date, has killed over 32 million people.
The pattern is sobering: the human quest for meat functions as a key driver
of the emergence of deadly infectious diseases that kill countless human and
nonhuman animals.
Considering the toll, and the ongoing threat to lives and livelihoods posed
by COVID-19, it’s worth asking whether the conditions that led to its
emergence exist elsewhere. The answer is a resounding yes: conditions
conducive to the emergence and spread of virulent pathogens exist in
industrialized animal farming operations. Ninety-nine percent of farmed
animals in the U.S. come from factory farms. Globally, the figure is 90
percent. The vast majority of meat, dairy, and eggs consumed today come from
operations in which billions of cows, pigs, chickens, ducks, goats, sheep,
and other immunologically-compromised animals are confined in cramped,
unhygienic conditions, and often transported long distances. These
operations have been identified as hot spots for the cross-infection of
diseases and the mutation of viruses, some with pandemic potential.
Avian influenza, or “bird flu,” is another case in point. Humans have more
in common with chickens than most realize, namely a susceptibility to
infection with similar viruses. Human pandemics can arise when a strain of
the avian influenza virus is transmitted from its source in wild aquatic
birds to farmed chickens. A strain of avian influenza caused the 1918
Spanish Flu pandemic that killed 50 to 100 million humans. Tens of thousands
of wounded WWI soldiers had gathered in crowded, unhygienic army camps on
the Western Front, in close proximity to pig farms and duck, geese, and
chicken markets; the circumstances resulted in cross-species transmission of
the virus. The demobilization of troops at the end of the war served as the
means of dispersing the virus around the globe. Those same
pandemic-producing conditions currently exist in industrialized animal
farming operations, the main difference being that in 1918, the soldiers
functioned as the warehoused chickens through which the virus simmered and
then propagated.
Avian influenza viruses are especially dangerous because some strains infect
not only birds but also other mammals. When two or more strains of the virus
infect the same cell in, say, a pig, a chicken, or a human, the animal or
human host acts as a “mixing vessel”—like a cocktail shaker—in which the
different strains undergo a process of “reassortment.” The various strains
combine to create “novel”—new—strains of infectious disease with pandemic
potential. When an avian influenza virus infected farmed pigs, it evolved to
produce the H1N1 strain of swine flu, itself a combination of four different
viruses from three different species—pigs, birds, and humans. The resulting
1957 Asian Flu pandemic and the 1968 Hong Kong Flu pandemic each caused
between one and four million human deaths; the 2009 H1N1 Swine Flu epidemic
killed almost 300,000 people. These figures do not include the numbers of
animal deaths, which far exceed the human toll. The African Swine Fever
virus currently ravaging pig farming operations in China, for example, has
led to the death of millions of pigs, many culled by brutal means. The same
virus has led to the culling of almost six million pigs in Vietnam in the
past year alone. The mandatory killing of farmed animals wherever contagions
emerge—whether the animals are infected or not—is not limited to Asia. More
than 6.5 million cows, pigs, and sheep were culled in Britain in 2001 during
the foot-and-mouth disease epidemic. The repeated, worldwide,
infection-induced, mass culling of farmed animals should itself serve as a
grave warning sign of a dangerously unhealthy industry, whether one is
concerned solely for the wellbeing of one’s own species or for that of
others. The viruses that periodically trigger such mass killings continue to
combine and mutate, creating novel, potentially lethal diseases to which no
one is immune.
Numerous studies demonstrate how intensive animal farming increases the risk
of pandemics. Research shows that confined animal feeding operations amplify
novel influenza strains and that large-scale commercial animal farms
increase the risk of outbreaks and transmission of zoonotic disease,
function to maintain and disperse highly virulent strains of influenza and
increase the frequency and scale of highly pathogenic outbreaks. It also
shows that factory farm-induced deforestation and rampant antibiotic use
heighten risk of the emergence of novel diseases. Intensive animal farming
unquestionably poses a grave, pandemic-level threat to human and animal
health. A 2017 study found that the speed with which new strains of
influenza are emerging has increased since 2000, raising the likelihood of
pandemics. In the present, grim context of yet another global pandemic
precipitated by the human demand for meat, we’ve largely chosen to remain
willfully ignorant of the dangers posed by the source of the vast majority
of that meat: factory farms.
Evolutionary ecologist Rob Wallace, author of Big Farms Make Big Flu, argues
that a factory farm-spawned pandemic is not just possible; it’s probable.
“Agribusiness,” he writes, “backed by state power at home and abroad, is now
working as much with influenza as against it.” Dr. Michael Greger, author of
How Not to Die and Bird Flu: A Virus of Our Own Hatching, calls factory
farming a “perfect storm environment” for “super-strains” of infectious
diseases. “If you actually want to create global pandemics,” he says, “then
build factory farms.” Some may consider such perspectives to be extreme, but
they are echoed by mainstream voices. In 2008, the Pew Commission, in its
report on industrial farm animal production in America, warned of the
“unacceptable” public health risks posed by industrialized animal
agriculture. Public health professionals have long been aware of the
dangers. In 2003, an editorial in the American Journal of Public Health
advocated for an end to factory farming, explicitly acknowledging that
killing animals for food—especially via intensive animal
agriculture—increases the likelihood of epidemics. The author of that
prescient article, Dr. David Benatar, wrote: “Those who consume animals not
only harm those animals and endanger themselves, but they also threaten the
well-being of other humans who currently or will later inhabit the planet…It
is time for humans to remove their heads from the sand and recognize the
risk to themselves that can arise from their maltreatment of other species.”
In China, before the COVID-19 outbreak led authorities to close down
wildlife markets, the wildlife industry was valued at over $74 billion.
Critics, aware of the trade’s potential to unleash virulent infectious
diseases, have for years complained that government policy has been hijacked
by commercial interests. It took an epidemic and near-shutdown of the
Chinese economy to precipitate a permanent ban on the consumption and trade
of wildlife. The conditions that triggered the emergence of COVID-19 exist
in plain sight on factory farms. Shouldn’t governments take action before
the emergence of another, possibly deadlier, epidemic, rather than after?
The economic interests of intensive animal farming operations—not to mention
our own appetites for flesh—continue to eclipse the imperatives of public
health. If policymakers are serious about preventing pandemics rather than
reacting to the carnage after the fact, then it’s time to do with factory
farms what China did with wildlife markets—shut them down altogether.
Number of animals killed in the world by the fishing, meat, dairy and egg industries, since you opened this webpage.
0 marine animals
0 chickens
0 ducks
0 pigs
0 rabbits
0 turkeys
0 geese
0 sheep
0 goats
0 cows / calves
0 rodents
0 pigeons/other birds
0 buffaloes
0 dogs
0 cats
0 horses
0 donkeys and mules
0 camels / camelids