Marking the 4,000th download of our new white paper ‘COVID-19 and Animal Exploitation: Preventing the Next Global Pandemic’, we examine the case for abolishing factory farming as a means to delay, if not prevent, the next catastrophe. 

You don’t have to be an expert to understand that life after COVID-19 will never be quite the same again. With the tragic loss of life, the economic and financial turmoil, and the profound effects of social distancing on the health of our loved ones, telling people that this is only a taste of what is to come is a difficult task.

However, as uncomfortable a truth as it may be, with countries slowly emerging from lockdown and life returning to a semblance of normality, it is more important than ever to remind ourselves that it is not just a case of if, but when it happens again - and chances are high that it will be far deadlier. Leading health expert Dr Michael Greger, author of How to Survive a Pandemic, recently spoke to Surge co-director Ed Winters in an episode of the Disclosure Podcast and gave the example of avian influenza that can have a mortality rate an order of magnitude greater than COVID-19.

SARS-Cov2, the virus responsible for COVID-19, has a mortality rate of less than 1% by most estimates - less than one in every 100 confirmed cases. Depending on the strain, avian influenza AKA ‘bird flu’ is known to kill 30% or more. If >1% mortality caused such profound effects on our society, imagine a death toll 30 times greater affecting old and young alike. The lights and internet stayed on this time, but how much would it take for our infrastructure to simply shut down?

COVID-19 and avian influenza are both zoonotic diseases, in that they originated in animals before passing to humans with deadly consequences. They are not the only zoonoses to have caused widespread loss of human life: 1918 ‘Spanish’ flu, HIV/AIDS, Ebola, BSE/vCJD, swine flu, Nipah and Hendra, SARS and MERS, all originated from animals and all as a result of our exploitation of them.

In fact, according to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), “scientists estimate that more than six out of every ten known infectious diseases in people can be spread from animals, and three out of every four new or emerging infectious diseases in people come from animals.” 

As well as the CDC, the World Health Organisation, Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) all raise concerns about the threat that zoonoses pose to human life.

What can be done about this? We will never be able to reduce the chances of potentially pandemic-causing zoonotic pathogens passing from animals to humans to zero, but given our own role in all this, there is a great deal we can do to reduce the threat considerably. Taking the example of avian influenza as the next big one, past bird flu pandemics such as Hong Kong flu and Asian flu all originated from intensively farmed poultry. The resulting mass culling of chickens, Hong Kong’s entire population of chickens in fact, successfully halted the pandemic at the time. Culling has also proved effective in halting epidemics of other zoonotic diseases, but why respond reactively rather than simply not raising animals for human consumption in the first place?

This may be anecdotal evidence as to the effectiveness of reducing populations of all farmed animals, but as a sample it is hard to refute. Intensive farming creates unhygienic conditions perfect for populations of viruses in this case to thrive, mutate and jump the species divide - the average chicken shed is the perfect storm when it comes to deadly infections. It seems to us to be more than just common sense to say that doing away with intensive farming is the way to go to prevent or slow the emergence of diseases we are barely prepared for, even after COVID-19.

We not only explore this argument further, but also provide background on all the major outbreaks of the past 120 years with supporting research and articles in our latest white paper entitled COVID-19 and Animal Exploitation: Preventing the Next Global Pandemic, which is available to download now from the Surge website.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Andrew Gough is Media & Education Coordinator for Surge.