Health Issues // Animalborne Diseases
Eating Meat Puts Millions at Risk of Contracting Bird FluAvian influenza, or “bird flu,” threatens humanity with the greatest public health crisis in recorded history. Experts have warned Congress that the disease could kill one in every eight people worldwide, including 40 million Americans, and cause a collapse of the world economy.1 People who take chicken flesh and eggs into their homes are putting themselves and their families at a heightened risk. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization, the virus can be caught simply by eating undercooked meat or eggs, by eating food prepared on the same cutting board as infected meat or eggs, or even by touching eggshells contaminated with the disease.2,3 If you care about keeping your family safe but don’t want to treat your kitchen like a biohazard laboratory, you should stop purchasing and eating chicken flesh and eggs today. Key Ways to Protect You and Your Family From Bird Flu U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt called the likelihood of an influenza pandemic “very high, some say even certain.”4 Just walk into any factory-farm chicken or turkey shed, and it’s easy to see why. One shed houses tens of thousands of birds who are never allowed outside. They are surrounded by their own waste and breathe ammonia-laden air that burns their lungs and damages their immune systems. The conditions in these sheds provide ideal breeding grounds for pathogens, because birds live amid their own feces from birth to slaughter and egg-laying hens are kept in stacked cages so that feces from the birds on top fall on the birds below. When one bird gets sick, the disease can quickly spread to all of them. Learn more about the bird-flesh and egg industries.
The giant corporations that run factory farms know that they have created ideal breeding grounds for deadly viruses and other diseases, so they dose animals with massive amounts of drugs. In fact, in the U.S., chickens receive more than three times as many antibiotics as humans do.5 However, these antibiotics are only temporarily effective against bacteria, and they are completely useless against viruses such as bird flu. In fact, the widespread use of the antiviral drug amantadine to control viral outbreaks in animals on Chinese farms has made bird flu drug-resistant, rendering the drug useless to protect humans.6 And the problem is not restricted to birds: Factory-farmed cows and pigs, who also live in crowded and unsanitary conditions, can get and spread influenza and similar viruses.7 Hans-Gerhard Wagner, a senior officer with the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization, has called the “intensive industrial farming of livestock” an “opportunity for emerging disease.” In other words, giant factory farms are veritable flu-making facilities.8 Learn more about how factory farming causes diseases to become drug-resistant. The risk posed by bird flu could not be more real or more dire. Senior U.N. System Coordinator for Avian and Human Influenza Dr. David Nabarro describes it as a threat to “the survival of the world as we know it.”9 Dr. Gregory A. Poland of the Mayo Clinic has called it “what could arguably be the most horrific disaster in modern history.”10 Other experts describe the effects on society: “We haven’t even begun to conceive of, to understand, to comprehend what that may mean for our workplace”; “[S]chools are closed ... transportation systems are curtailed or shut down. … Critical infrastructure will or may fail: food, water, power, gas, electricity”; and “When this happens, time will be described, for those left living, as before and after the pandemic.”11
Each time that you put yourself in contact with or consume animal products, you risk becoming infected with this or some other harmful virus. If you eat meat, then you need to treat your kitchen like a biohazard laboratory in order to protect yourself and your family from bird flu and similar foodborne diseases. But there’s an easier and healthier solution—adopting a vegetarian diet. Order a free emergency vegetarian starter kit—which includes delicious recipes—to get started today. For more information about bird flu and how factory farming is largely responsible for the disease, read Dr. Michael Greger’s book Bird Flu: A Virus of Our Own Hatching and watch his new short video.
1 Dana Milbank, "Capitol Hill Flu Briefing Was No Trick, and No Treat," The Washington Post 13 Oct. 2005: A02.
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A contingent of scientists called together by the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Organization for Animal Health agrees that bird flu is primarily spread by the poultry industry.12 If the current strain of bird flu does not cause a pandemic, experts believe that it’s only a matter of time before another one does. These viruses are constantly changing, and weaker forms in birds are known to take just months to mutate into highly pathogenic forms for which no effective treatment or vaccine exists.13 Outbreaks of other strains are regularly detected—Pennsylvania alone detects 15 to 20 outbreaks each year.14,15,16