Chicken virus will make Covid-19 look like nothing.....

[Needamanicure]

Dr Michael Greger, suggests "an apocalyptic virus that would make corona seem irrelevant"

Leading scientist warns of the danger of a pandemic triggered by chicken farms that could kill half the world's population - yes it is reported in the Daily Mail, The Sun and a few regional papers. This guy thinks we are headed for more animal spawned virus in the coming years so seat belt up and wait for it....

YABU - don't be stupid it won't happen for a long time - worry story

YANBU - the way humans farm animals it will happen sooner than you think

If we don't learn from our mistakes and start treating animals better there will be more viruses. And they might not have such a low death count as corona virus. It is russian roulette we are playing with the planet right now. Sooner or later we are going to cause something horrific that won't be as easily fixed as a few months of lockdown and social distancing measures. Anyone who thinks this is a load of hysterical nonsense needs to unbury their head, take a step back and have a long, hard look at what we are doing to the planet right now and then stop taking it for granted.

It's time to hide under your bedsheets and wish you'd never been born.

O0 - you sound seriously overwrought

Or, OP, looking on the positive side - this current crisis may cause food producers to take more care in their procedures, and/or regulations will be tightened. Also, those “fearful and frankly ridiculous people” you refer to will take extra care themselves, further lessening the risk.

YABU.

Ah, Michael Greger - the doomsday, apocalyptic scaremongering ‘expel’

Nice one, OP

‘Expert’

Intensive farming practises need to change absolutely but I think this is a scare story.

And BTW if avian flu mutates to become more transmissible between humans it is highly likely that it will also become less deadly.

This sort of possibility is one reason why I haven't been in the slightest bit concerned about Covid.

Yes and there is a massive rock (don't know the technical term) balanced somewhere near the Azores in the Atlantic that could easi unbalance and cause a tidal wave that would wipe out the South of England.
And the dinosaurs were quoted out by a meteorite. And Sam Francisco is long overdue for an earthquake that would devastate the world economy.
And in the long run we are all dead.
So take a sensible approach to the thingd you can control, lobby the Gvt to ban chicken farming and enjoy the sunshine.

Just as well the government didn't just vote to lower standards in farming. Oh, wait....

Daily Fail lol
For all your throughly researched and considered scientific studies.....

Poor dinosaurs being quoted out

and who is Sam Francisco?

What @BeltaneBride said! Great post.

🌞 ☀️ 🌞 ☀️

Honestly the shit they pumped through animals with and the way they farm them is grim. I've been vege / vegan for years and I'm bloody glad .. it's a disaster waiting to happen for all the cheap meat 'we' desire !! 🙄🙄

I watched a ted talk recently on how coronavirus is our future. We as a species are pushing further into the animal kingdom and encountering diseases that we're not equipped to deal with. MERS, SARS, Covid 19. I do think at some point we're going to meet something awful but maybe I've watched to many movies.

Typed long post and lost it.

Short version. Lab based meat is very close to becoming mainstream. Meat will be grown in a similar way to plants being grown hydroponically. No live animals involved other than one tissue sample - from a feather in the case of chicken. It'll end factory farming and will be antibiotic and hormone free. Massive companies are heavily invested in making this a reality in the next few years and have got the basic processes working and just need to be able to produce it faster and more efficiently which will happen once more supporting industries start springing up to provide feed and machinery. Hurray!

YABU - he has an agenda.

He's also writing based on US farming practices, whereas in the UK/EU we have much stricter hygiene and welfare standards. Or rather, in the UK we currently have much higher standards but are about to lose the EU benchmark.

One thing that Covid-19 has brought home is that UK chicken farms have better biosecurity than care homes for the elderly.

I think the big one will be bacterial, not viral.
The over use of antibiotics will cause it.

On the plus side, diseases that are more deadly, like Ebola, tend to spread less easily because they kill their hosts before they can be spread.
Gotta find a bright side somewhere!

ChickieNobs will save us!

Op, anything could happen at any time to wipe us all out. There is enough misery and fear around without having to deal with "what if" scare stories. Some people are struggling to cope and this sort of scaremongering is cruel.

Agree that intensive farming should be stopped, though.

I always think that these type of threads/articles swipe at the low hanging fruit.

It's very easy to pick one issue and go mental when you have the means to make choices that move you into the moral high ground. It's kind of different when you are a poor, uneducated woman with no access to contraception or abortion and are trying to feed your ever growing family. I think if we really want people to change we need to address the root cause.
But that's a lot harder and more effort than just pontificating about how great you are being a vegan/pro life/anti vax and how shite everyone else is in comparison.

Before the flaming starts it's the pontificating and seeming others as less than you I'm against, as far as the cause of said pontificating you do you. So sorry that wasn't clear.

I read this article earlier as well. Yes, it's in the Daily Fail but the sources can be found in more reliable places.
He may be an activist but his general theme is correct. Many of our diseases originated, historically, in animals, passed via another 'bridge' and mutated to human form....these include tuberculosis, whooping cough, influenza and so on. There will be others in the future.

Our current factory farming practices make this sort of thing more likely, as does our destruction of the natural habitat (eg. destruction of rain forests). We complain about China's market - rightly so - but on our own doorstep our factory-farmed chickens have terrible lives in disgusting conditions.
The article doesn't even mention global warming, but climate change is also a factor....diseases and disease-carrying insects are moving to new countries (mostly northwards) because the warming climate means they can now live in places where before they would die.

Sadly, there have been those who have preached 'pandemics' before and said "be prepared" but we have not. We have done just the same...it's gloom and doom, where is the science, it won't happen for generations..... And then COVID happens and we weren't prepared. You'd have thought that alone would make people listen but no, let's just keep up our practices of keeping animals in dreadful conditions, slashing trees off the planet, warming the globe....

I despair of the human race sometimes....

YABU. We are sleepwalking into the real crisis and that's environmental collapse.

Humans are pretty good at reacting to immediate threats, that's how we evolved. We're bloody awful at reacting to long term danger though. That's why we panic about coronavirus etc even whilst Brazil use the crisis to quietly ramp up the destruction of the Amazon and Trump has rolled back environment protection laws. The post Covid recession that will damage our kids lives is nothing to the mess we're leaving our grandkids.

Weirdly One of the biggest worries in global warming is that when the ice caps melt it will release ice age bacteria and viruses that will wipe out millions of modern humans because we've never seen them before.

But hey, it's sunny so let's not worry too much.