Veganist_ Lose Weight, Get Healthy, Change the World - Kathy Freston [43]
KF: Why do we have this potential disaster on our hands?
MG: The industrialization of the chicken and pork industries is thought to have wrought these unprecedented changes in avian and swine influenza. No one even got sick from bird flu for eight decades before a new strain H5N1 started killing children in 1997. Likewise, in pigs here in the U.S., swine flu was totally stable for eight decades before a pig-bird-human hybrid mutant virus appeared in commercial pig populations in 1998. It was that strain that combined with a Eurasian swine flu virus ten years later to spawn the flu pandemic of 2009, which sickened millions of young people around the world.
The first hybrid mutant swine flu virus discovered in the United States was at a factory farm in North Carolina in which thousands of pregnant sows were confined in “gestation crates,” veal-crate-like metal stalls barely larger than their bodies. These kind of stressful, filthy, overcrowded conditions can provide a breeding ground for the emergence and spread of new diseases.
So far, only thousands of people have died from swine flu. Unless we radically change the way chickens and pigs are raised for food, though, it may only be a matter of time before a catastrophic pandemic arises.
KF: If factory farms are to blame, why have there been plagues and flus throughout time, when factory farms were not around?
MG: Before the domestication of birds, about 2,500 years ago, human influenza likely didn’t even exist. Similarly, before the domestication of livestock there were no measles, smallpox, or many other diseases that have plagued humanity since they were born in the barnyard about 10,000 years ago. Once diseases jump the species barrier from the animal kingdom, they can spread independently throughout human populations with tragic consequences.
The worst plague in human history was the 1918 flu pandemic triggered by a bird flu virus that went on to kill upwards of 50 million people. The crowded, stressful, unhygienic trench warfare conditions during World War I that led to the emergence of the 1918 virus are replicated today in nearly every industrial chicken shed and egg operation. Instead of millions of vulnerable hosts to evolve within back then, we now have billions of chickens intensively confined in factory farms, arguably the perfect-storm environment for the emergence and spread of hypervirulent, so-called predator-type viruses like H5N1. The 1918 virus killed about 2.5 percent of the people it infected, twenty times deadlier than the seasonal flu. H5N1 is now killing 60 percent of infected people, twenty times deadlier than the 1918 virus. So if a virus like 1918’s gained easy human transmissibility, it could make the 1918 pandemic—the deadliest plague ever—look like the regular flu.
KF: Does handling or eating chicken or pork increase a person’s chances of contracting the virus?
MG: There are certainly lots of viruses people can pick up from handling fresh meat, such as those that cause unpleasant conditions like contagious pustular dermatitis and a well-defined medical condition known as “butcher’s warts.” Even the wives of butchers appear to be at higher risk for cervical cancer, a cancer definitively associated with wart virus exposure.
Cooking can destroy the flu virus, and the same can be said for all the other bugs that sicken 76 million Americans a year. The problem is that people can cross-contaminate kitchen surfaces with fresh or frozen meat before pathogens have been cooked to death. There have been a number of cases of human influenza linked to the consumption of poultry products, but swine flu viruses don’t appear to get into the meat. Regardless, the primary risk is not in the meat, but how meat is produced. Once a new disease is spawned from factory farm conditions it may be able to spread person to person, and at that point animals—live or dead—may be out of the picture.
KF: How do we stave off the risk?
MG: We need to give these animals more breathing room. The Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production,