Our Not If, But When campaign is centred around discussing the inextricable link between animal farming and infectious zoonotic disease. As a recent UN report has further highlighted, animal farming and animal exploitation have to be eliminated if we are to reduce our risk of future pandemics, because simply put, whilst we have animal farms we will have pandemics.

The second video of the campaign is centred on bird flu. We keep hearing comparisons between what is happening now with COVID-19, and what happened in the 1918 influenza pandemic that infected one third of the world’s population, and killed around 50 million people and is one of the most severe pandemics in recorded human history.

The 1918 flu was caused by an influenza virus subtype H1N1, a bird flu. The origin of which is strongly thought to be a poultry farm in Kansas, where it spread throughout most cities in the US and reached Europe via the hundreds of thousands of American soldiers who crossed the Atlantic during the first world war. In fact, all three of the pandemics that took place in the 20th century were all caused by different strains of avian influenza.

Could this happen again, and what is the risk to the human population living in the modern world, in 2020?