A Meat and Dairy Article from All-Creatures.org

Dairy Cows Test Positive for Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI)

From OurHonor.org
March 2024

Is it possible to win an ever-escalating arms race against nature?.... What if we redirected funds towards supporting slaughter-free farmers and businesses? A recent study published in Nature says that investing in food production methods that don’t require slaughtering animals would save us $7.3 trillion globally in health burdens and ecosystem degradation.

 

This past Sunday, the United States Department of Agriculture confirmed milk and oropharyngeal samples obtained from sick dairy cattle tested positive for Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI). Officials have been investigating a mysterious illness among dairy cattle in the past few weeks. The positive tests came from two dairy facilities in Kansas and one facility in Texas.

The total number of dairy cattle affected or at risk is still unknown. Sid Miller, Texas' agriculture commissioner, said that, unlike for poultry, he doesn't foresee a need to depopulate cattle herds. "Cattle are expected to fully recover," he said, and on social media he indicated that the HPAI-positive cattle will be quarantined. Since they plan to not cull infected cattle, at what point will the meat and milk return to the food chain? Will producers receive indemnity payments for the loss of productivity due to HPAI infections?

A key reason for depopulation of poultry was to prevent further disease spread and the infection of other animals. What kind of risk do these infected cattle pose to other animals? The National Cattlemen's Beef Association issued a statement saying, “USDA has confirmed that affected dairy cows do not appear to be transmitting the virus to other cattle within the same herd.”

However, in an interview in Science, when asked whether the virus was being transmitted from cow to cow, Gregory Gray, an epidemiologist at the University of Texas Medical Branch, “We don’t know. I don’t think anybody’s done those experiments. I would think that would be one of the things that people would want to investigate rather quickly.” Gray also added, “Initially, we thought we would be able to work with many farms in Texas, because they’re concerned about keeping their animals free from disease. But there’s been a real resistance to collaborating with us. There’s concern that we might find something that would damage their business.”

Today, we consume more slaughter-based meat than ever before. In 1961, we ate 50.6 lbs per person yearly. In 2020, that number jumped to 264 lbs per year, thanks to publicly funded bailouts, subsidies, marketing, and research.

Is it possible to win an ever-escalating arms race against nature?

There has been an increase in the emergence of zoonotic diseases. Recent work out of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, led by Dr. Aaron Bernstein, shows that by addressing the causes of pandemics we can not only save billions of dollars, but lives as well. “high-density livestock operations can serve as an opportune environment for spillover from wild animals into livestock or as incubators for pandemic influenza strains ... Large pig and poultry farms are where the genetic re-assortment needed to source pandemic influenza strains may most likely occur.”

Sinel and Weis point out in a recent paper, “Infectious disease experts have long warned that the next pandemic could well emerge from a virulent new variant of avian or swine influenza spilling over into a human population and becoming transmissible through human-to-human contact.”

What if we redirected funds towards supporting slaughter-free farmers and businesses? A recent study published in Nature says that investing in food production methods that don’t require slaughtering animals would save us $7.3 trillion globally in health burdens and ecosystem degradation.

Will you join us in raising awareness about the public health and food security threat posed by our reliance on slaughter-based protein production? We want to amplify this story by publishing dozens of Letters to the Editor and Op-Eds in local newspapers.

Interested in helping? Send us an email at [email protected]!

 

UPDATE April 4, 2024:

New York Times Front Page Story Today: HPAI bailouts for billion-dollar corporations that used heatstroke to kill animals

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