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The "our desire for animal meat may bring more devasting pandemics" proposal

#1
C C Offline
One Root Cause of Pandemics Few People Think About
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/obs...ink-about/

EXCERPT (Paul Shapiro): . . . When that day comes, it’s very likely that such a virus will also have its origin in humanity’s seemingly insatiable desire to eat animals, whether wild or domestic. The conditions in which we often farm animals today—crowding tens of thousands of animals wing-to-wing or snout-to-snout—serve as “amplifiers” for viral pandemics.

Indeed, the H1N1 swine flu outbreak of 2009 appears to have originated in a pig confinement operation in North Carolina. And while the H5N1 bird flu outbreak in 1997 evidently originated in Chinese chicken farms (case fatality rate 60 percent), a similar bird flu in the U.S. just five years ago led American poultry farmers to kill tens of millions of their birds to contain the outbreak, which thankfully never made the jump into the human population. And at this very moment, both India and China have announced bird flu outbreaks among their chicken factories. Similarly, these are not yet affecting human health.

But you can only play viral Russian roulette for so long, which is why public health experts concerned about zoonotic diseases have for years been ringing the alarm about the industrial farming of animals. Michael Greger, author of Bird Flu: A Virus of Our Own Hatching, calls factory farming a “perfect storm environment” for infectious diseases. “If you actually want to create global pandemics,” he warns, “then build factory farms.” (MORE - details)
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#2
Zinjanthropos Offline
Maybe plants need more time

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3550769/

We seem to monkey around more with plant genetics than animals..... so here's to genetically modifying the critters we eat and even us too if it helps avoid pandemic. 

Can you imagine a virus affecting humans suddenly showing up in Hemp? Watch that sucker dealt with promptly.
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#3
Secular Sanity Offline
There’s a concern that Zombie Deer Disease might make that barrier jump through human consumption. That one would be like the World War Z zombie pandemic.  Confused

"Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, compared the situation to "mad cow" disease in the 1980s and 1990s in the United Kingdom, when there was public doubt that it could spread to humans."

The origin and mode of transmission of the prions causing CWD is unknown, but recent research indicates that prions can be excreted by deer and elk, and are transmitted by eating grass growing in contaminated soil. Animals born in captivity and those born in the wild have been affected with the disease. Based on epidemiology, transmission of CWD is thought to be lateral (from animal to animal). Maternal transmission may occur, although it appears to be relatively unimportant in maintaining epidemics. An infected deer's saliva is able to spread the CWD prions. Exposure between animals is associated with sharing food and water sources contaminated with CWD prions shed by diseased deer.

As of 2013, no evidence has been found of transmission to humans from cervids, nor by eating cervids, but both channels remain a subject of public health surveillance and research.

It came to light in August 2019 that prior to 2014 in Canada, all animals on CWD-infected farms were buried or incinerated. But in a mysterious change of policy, since then the CFIA has allowed animals from CWD-infected farms to enter the food chain because there is "no national requirement to have animals tested for the disease". From one CWD-infected herd in Alberta, 131 elk were sold for human consumption"


Chronic Wasting Disease and Potential Transmission to Humans
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