Swine flu and lust for flesh
Colorado Springs — Cramming sick animals together is not generally considered the best way to ensure health, including health for the animals, or even the humans that beat, prod, poke, inoculate, vaccinate, aerate and convert the animals into "food." But to meet the world's great and overwhelming lust for the tang of flesh, the sensuous ripping of bloody meat from bone, pigs are packed together, chickens are crammed into clumps, cows are driven together so tightly that they cannot move.
Exercise is essential for health, but it is not a requirement for producing tasty fleshy foods. For meat, the less exercise, the better. The tastier.
But what of health?
Who cares about health? These are not pets we factory farm, but merely food before it is shrink-wrapped into neat packages. Health? Just cook it, and cook it well. Cook it good.
We are told, we are assured, we are promised, that pork is safe, that chicken is safe. Cows are good, and friendly. Just cook it good. Cook it well.
We need to give these animals more breathing room. The Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production, which included a former U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, concluded that industrialized animal agriculture posed "unacceptable" public health risks and called for gestation crates for pigs to be banned as they're already doing in Europe, noting that "[p]ractices that restrict natural motion, such as sow gestation crates, induce high levels of stress in the animals and threaten their health, which in turn may threaten human health." - Michael Greger, M.D.
The Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO) and factory farming is a relatively new phenomenon, inspired by a spiraling out of control attempt to profit on a meat-maddened world's lust for flesh. Americans today that eat an average of 75 pounds of chicken, fifteen years ago ate less than 25 pounds annually. People want meat, not because it is good or healthy, but because the blood tastes good.
Not only has this amassment of animals into too-close quarters laid the blueprint for the current 2009-2010 pandemic, but new and horrifically unimaginable monstrosities may be just on the horizon:
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 8 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, sickening millions of young people around the world. - Michael Greger, M.D. - Kathy Freston - AlterNet
The best known example of a disease that was passed from animals to humans, reports the Telegraph, is HIV, believed to have crossed from chimps to humans in West Africa. Since then more than 25 million people have died from AIDS, reports the Telegraph. A more recent occurrence is the swine flu pandemic, which is a result of mixing viruses that infected humans, pigs and birds to create a new strain.
Breeding genetically uniform and sickness-prone birds in the overcrowded, stressful, feces-infested and artificially lit conditions of factory farms promotes the growth and mutation of pathogens. The "cost of increased efficiency," the report concludes, is increased global risk for diseases. Our choice is simple: cheap chicken or our health. Today, the factory farm-pandemic link couldn't be more lucid. The primary ancestor of the recent H1N1 swine flu outbreak originated at a hog factory farm in America's most hog-factory-rich state, North Carolina, and then quickly spread throughout the Americas. - Jonathan Safran Foer, Special to CNN
The most direct and straightforward key to heading off the current 2009-2010 and future pandemics is for society to switch to a vegetarian lifestyle, both to eliminate the threat of massed animals passing illnesses to humans, and also to build a healthier immune system in people:
We've known for 20 years that the immune function of those eating vegetarian may be superior to those eating meat. First published in 1989, researchers at the German Cancer Research Center found that although vegetarians had the same number of disease-fighting white blood cells compared to meat eaters, the immune cells of vegetarians were twice as effective in destroying their targets--not only cancer cells, but virus-infected cells as well. So a more plant-based diet may protect both now and in the future against animal-borne diseases like pandemic influenza.
Do we hide our heads in the sand, stubbornly insisting that the taste of meat justifies cruelty to animals, cancer in humans, and future pandemics? Or do we come to our senses and take charge of both our personal, immediate health, and the health of our future? If more and more people cast their vote differently when making purchases at the market, the for-profit profiteers will almost immediately switch direction to profit from that more responsible lifestyle.
It is not too late to begin making more responsible decisions, even those as simple as shopping habits. Eating habits. Healthy habits.
