Pandemics and conection ro meat eating / meat production .

[Yumskiyorks]

As far as am aware several pandemics or illnesses appear to have been linked to the inceasing demand on meat production / less natural reationship with nature ,animals and humans and use of animals / cleandliness/ ovwr production .. ie less respect for natural world and animals as seen as units of production .
Mad cow disease, covid etc.
Feel like this current situation is ideal opportunty to review our practices .? Be more respectful and less destructive as a race ? Anyone agree. ?

Prior to covid 19 which was the previous pandemic?

I said pandemics and other illnesses ? Eg mad cow .

I might have agreed if we were talking about mad cow disease (where eating the beef caused the illness) but Vegetarians catch Covid too.

I mean the clear link between animal husbandry amd illness.
I thought covis came from the low animal welfare markets in china . Therefore our abuse of animals in human care leads to things like covid as well as via eating diseased or ill animals .

More broadly, disease follows civilisation. Large groups of people living amongst each other, sharing resources and intermingling. Viruses and bacteria don’t give a dime for “respect”, they aren’t sentient or sentimental.

That’s not to say that we shouldn’t reflect on how we treat our environment, or whether eating meat is sustainable or kind. But if Covid did originate where we think it did, in a wet market, then the problem is more one of (lack of) sanitation and poverty, all of which are more complex problems to solve and not one which a few people in the developed world ruminating on respectful treatment of animals can begin to tackle.

Yes I agree completely. There are dozens of articles online about trying to prevent diseases in poultry.

Factory farming has to stop and we all need to buy less, and local. But I look around and see very little change.

I thought covis came from the low animal welfare markets in china . Therefore our abuse of animals in human care leads to things like covid

I don't think that's been established as the definite location at this point, and even if it did originate from the wet market, further investigations would be necessary to determine the exact cause of the virus (e.g. poor hygiene, abuse of animals, genetic mutation, cannibalism, etc.).

I'm not saying we shouldn't treat animals better and rethink our practices - I just think it's too early to point to Covid specifically as the reason to do so.

Was SARs animal-related? MERs? Measles? Polio? They are the other major diseases I can think of that have been in the news in recent years. Oh Ebola too, possibly a point on that one.

CJD was of course awful for the families affected but mercifully the numbers seem to have been low. There are other prion diseases out there...Kuru is sort of animal origin of you consider cannibalism as animal-related....

Pandemics etc become ever more likely where humans live densely, travel widely at speed and socialise with large numbers of people.

YABU to be latching on to basically anything as an excuse to preach a vegetarian/vegan agenda....again.... leave other people to make their own food choices in peace, please.

How do you propose to go about persuading people in the far east to adopt higher animal welfare standards? The standards in the western world are incredibly high already. Westerners eating less meat makes no difference to pandemics and so on, we need to clamp down on poor standards elsewhere. As Covid shows, the chain is only as strong as its weakest link.

Plenty of pandemics happened before mass farming existed though. You're arguing for a more natural approach to meat eating and production, but "natural" standards of hygiene and cleanliness are the problem. A highly sterilized production environment with preservatives and additives chucked into the meat makes it safer. Some guy collecting dead bats and selling them on his market stall is "natural" but highly risky.

@ComtesseDeSpair

More broadly, disease follows civilisation. Large groups of people living amongst each other, sharing resources and intermingling. Viruses and bacteria don’t give a dime for “respect”, they aren’t sentient or sentimental.

That’s not to say that we shouldn’t reflect on how we treat our environment, or whether eating meat is sustainable or kind. But if Covid did originate where we think it did, in a wet market, then the problem is more one of (lack of) sanitation and poverty, all of which are more complex problems to solve and not one which a few people in the developed world ruminating on respectful treatment of animals can begin to tackle.

Exactly my thoughts, articulated better than I ever could!

The CJD outbreak was caused by a change in the way meat meal was processed. The old plant used to process meal at sufficiently high temperatures to destroy the pathogen in sheep carcasses. New processing plants operated at lower temperatures, and thats how the prion moved form one species to another.

Well considering, at the time, everyone was going to be dying of CJD, I've only seen 1 case in the time I've been working at a hospice.

Was the Black Death or smallpox caused by industrial animal husbandry?

And the problem of talking about doing something “as a race” is that not everyone in “our race” is in the same position of privilege. The developed world can’t opine on what it thinks the developing world needs to do to be sustainable. What right do I have, with my fridge in which I can store meat, or with my excellent diet which I can remove meat from entirely and find a good substitute for, have to dictate about respect and kindness to somebody with no fridge who needs to buy their meat alive to keep it fresh, and can’t just decide to give up their main protein source? In the developed world, we’ve enjoyed for decades the spoils of processes and activities (cheap food from factory farming, cheap energy from fossil fuels) which we now want to tell other nations who haven’t had the benefits that these things are environmentally damaging or unsustainable or unkind and they need to find alternatives to.

Really, we need to find a way to bring everyone’s living standards to a more equal position, worldwide, if we want to tackle future pandemics. And that will mean some of us who are currently very comfortable becoming less comfortable. Nobody really wants that (and I definitely include myself there.)

YABU to be latching on to basically anything as an excuse to preach a vegetarian/vegan agenda....again.... leave other people to make their own food choices in peace, please.

100% agree with this.

Yes I think both Ebola and HIV are believed to have come via bushmeat and MERS came from camels although not by eating them. I think they also thought that the SARS pandemic was due to infected animals (civets and bats) in wild animal markets in China, similar to COVID-19. We need to learn our lesson when it comes to treating wild animals with respect!

How about Anthrax, Smallpox and Plague.

There have been zoonotic diseases for thousands of years, from the very point at which man began to live with animals, and you don't necessarily have to eat them, to catch the disease.

100% agree with you OP.

Didn't know that about SARS and MERS @PattyPan off to have a little read myself!
I was always surprised with MERS in general because you tend to think hot and arid places aren't great for propogating diseases.

OP I agree with you, and that's why I'm now a vegan. Everyone seems to be burying their heads in the sand with this. Not just covid and pandemics, but climate change, deforestation and the plain fact that animals are treated really, really badly.

Since we've started farming animals we've been exposed to more infectious diseases - TB for example we originally got from farming cattle (not badgers...).

Hunter-gatherer populations (which was the whole human species before some developed agriculture) have much lower rates of infectious diseases - due to both lower population density and less contact with farmed livestock. Contact builds immunity among those who survive - look at what happened when Native Americans encountered Europeans for the first time, they were decimated by diseases they had not been exposed to before (amongst other things).

We're basically in an eternal arms race with diseases - ones we've lived with (and died from) for thousands of years and new variants. Plus, increasingly, degenerative and lifestyle-related diseases (cancer, diabetes, heart disease etc) that in the past we might not have lived long enough to experience, if you were dying of measles at 5, in childbirth at 20 or of an infection at 30.

I think it's fascinating!

100% agree OP. Both in so many viruses likely caused by animals being kept and treated in shocking, disgusting conditions and the fact Covid affects obese people worse than non obese. Obesity is also so often linked to a diet high in red, processed meat. So theres a clear, direct correlation between both the origins of this virus as well as the people it most drastically affects being meat- obese, unhealthy people and their over consumption of it and the appalling standards in how we treat animals linked to the meat industry.

That's a big list OP, of course they are linked with "our relationship with nature ,animals and humans" where else would they possibly come from!!!!

So theres a clear, direct correlation between both the origins of this virus as well as the people it most drastically affects being meat- obese

So are the pasta-obese ok then?

Yes, new diseases don't tend to spring into existence fully-formed, they already exist less lethally in other species and then mutate into a form that humans can catch and spread (and we can give novel diseases to other species the same way).
Pigs, bats and birds seem especially likely to infect humans, which is very very unfortunate given how many humans live in close proximity to or eat these (especially, pigs, ducks and chickens).

www.gov.uk/government/publications/list-of-zoonotic-diseases/list-of-zoonotic-diseases (includes eg: Anthrax, Bubonic Plague etc)