Meat Causes Pandemics
By: Lila Copeland Los Angeles
Tags: Green New Deal, Plant Based, Meat, Vegan, Pandemic

by Lila Copeland

Earth Peace, Los Angeles California

The Spanish Flu outbreak that struck the planet from 1918–1920 is the single largest killer of humans in recorded history, with recent scholars reporting somewhere between 50 to 100 million people dead before the scourge was quelled. (1) The most widely accepted location for the genesis of the pandemic is the midwestern town that is now called Fort Riley in Kansas, where a large army training camp, then called Camp Funston, saw the first onslaught of the influenza which was soon carried by soldiers to France with the start of World War I. (1) RNA isolated from the tissue of deceased Spanish Flu victims was examined and confirmed the HA1 domain sequence, which resembled avian flu closely, but in fact is of mammalian zoonotic origin. (2) The landscape of 1918 Camp Funston, Kansas was totally agrarian. People lived mostly in sod houses with no heat or hot water and they farmed animals in primitive conditions. They raised cows, hogs, and chickens to eat and sell without sanitation. No one can prove categorically that the Spanish Flu came from the livestock of the people of Camp Funston, but it was mammalian, and that community relied one hundred percent on the animals they farmed in order to survive. Let’s say a lawyer had to prove his or her case before a jury that the Spanish Flu outbreak in Camp Funston came from farmed animals. They’d present the RNA evidence and then paint a portrait of animal farming life in that town in 1918 and they could produce a supporting verdict beyond a reasonable doubt.

Biologist Nathan Wolfe wrote: “Pandemics almost always begin with the transmission of an animal microbe to a human.” (3) In this fact lies the argument that pandemics come from meat, and more fully, from the diseased, and antiquated, and ruthless relationship humans have with animals. No pandemic ever came from a vegetable or fruit. Every time, it’s from animals who are being exploited and harmed by humans. We have all manner of convenient excuses to carry on this behavior: “Cave men did it”, “It’s always been this way”, “But what about protein?”, “Meat makes men big and strong”, the list goes on. The trouble is, biology is no longer going to tolerate this habitual abuse we deal out to animals. In 2020 an unmistakable gauntlet has been thrown down by nature: “Cut it out, or we will wipe you out.”

In 2009, an outbreak of H1N1, more commonly known as Swine Flu, took hold in California. The virus was spread through human contact with infected pig meat in slaughterhouses. The CDC also conjectured that the virus developed wings and spread worldwide with the aid of live export, one of the most cruel, heartless commercial practices in place today where animals are packed like bricks into cargo ships and sailed from one land to another to be sold for human consumption and profit. Global deaths with this pandemic were estimated to be up to 575,000 people worldwide. All because humans mistakenly believe they need to eat pigs and corporations cater to that faulty belief. (4)

The Asian Flu pandemic of 1957 killed an estimated 2 million people worldwide. Science established that the viral strain of avian H2 originated in wild migratory birds like gulls and ducks and were picked up by farmed birds in North America. After 1988, the prevalence of the avian flu strain has grown consistently on American turkey farms and the live bird markets that are ever popular in New York City. Scientists know and affirm that “antigenically conserved counterparts of the human Asian pandemic strain of 1957 continue to circulate in the avian reservoir and are coming into closer proximity to susceptible human populations.” (5) Essentially, when you walk the streets of New York and Brooklyn and pass these wet markets, you’re walking past hotbeds that are percolating with the ingredients of the next pandemic horror show for humans. Later on in 1968, another flu whose genes showed it was of avian origin took over 4 million lives worldwide, the Hong Kong Flu. It has not been proven exactly how this newer avian strain jumped from birds to humans.

COVID 19 deaths have not reached anywhere near the 4 million of the Hong Kong strain nor the 50 million of the Spanish strain as yet, but the toll taken is not only in the form of deaths. Millions of lives have been destroyed from businesses being shut down and lost due to lockdown restrictions. COVID 19, we know, came from infected bat meat in a wet market in Wuhan, China. Again, humans exploiting animals in every way they can. It can be argued that it’s no one’s fault, humans do what they have to in order to “survive”. In Wuhan, China, no one needs to eat bats and pangolins to “survive”. People there, like people in the US and any other western nation, are torturing, killing and exploiting animals based on one thing: ancient habits that no longer serve us.

There is a solution to this problem that threatens to end human existence on earth, causing untold agony for humans and animals along the way. Changing our paradigms and food systems to be based entirely on plants is the answer. Food technology has evolved to a point where this revelation is quite practically within reach. The result of such transformation globally will also have bonus repercussions. The decrease in methane and CO2 emissions from ending animal farming will put the arrest of rapid climate destruction into play. Cessation of catastrophic animal waste and its attendant dumping will allow oceans to heal from the now rapidly expanding ocean dead zones born of centralized feeding operations run by the likes of Tyson Foods in the midwest, and the four major hog farms in Pennsylvania now dumping 1.4 million tons of waste into the Chesapeake Bay each year. Those ocean dead zones are growing by hundreds of square miles annually. (2 of the 4 PA farms are: Country View Family Farms and Clemens Food Group, with the state government dumping millions of dollars of tax payer funded loans into their pork operations every year) (6) The Tyson Foods animal operations near the Mississsippi River have created the largest ocean dead zone in the world in the Gulf of Mexico, now over 8,000 square miles in size, where no form of life can exist. Our planet simply cannot sustain the volume of animal waste generated by our now ridiculous ancient habit of exploiting animals for food we do not need to thrive.

The fastest growing sector on the NASDAQ this year was plant based food. Beyond Meat, the plant meat pioneer, had an historically huge IPO in 2019, seeing its price rise 163% on day one and gaining billions in value. (7) Additionally, when the pandemic hit, Beyond continued to rise while its peers in the “real” meat industry took a beating due to the upset in the meat supply chain. Plant based futures may be pandemic proof. (8) Farmers can translate their animal operations into plant based ones with the right support and encouragement. Those multi-millions of dollars state governments and the Fed pour into animal operations can be rerouted to plant operations. All the weight of our tax dollars needs to be focused on this endeavor in order to solve the issue of pandemics that are looming quite inevitably on the horizon for humanity. The longer standing problem of premature human deaths from meat and dairy consumption as well as the aforementioned climate crisis will be heavily alleviated through changing to a plant based society. We have the solution at our fingertips. Changing a paradigm involves education, flexibility, and incentive, and in America, the richest nation in the world, we have unlimited access to all three.

sources:

1. Barry, John M. Journal of Translational Medicine, Jan 20 2004.



https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC340389/#:~:text=Both%20contemporary%20epidemiological%20studies%20and,Riley%2C%20in%20Kansas.



2. Reid, Ann H., Fanning, Thomas G., Hultin, Johan V., Taubenburger, Jeffrey,

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, February 16, 1999.



https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC15547/#:~:text=A%20mild%20wave%20of%20influenza,contagious%20but%20caused%20few%20deaths.&text=Additional%20sequence%20was%20obtained%20from,species%20of%20birds%20and%20mammals.



3) Wolfe, Nathan, The Viral Storm, Times Books, October 2011.



4) Levitt, Tom, et al. The Guardian: Covid and Farm Animals: 9 Pandemics that Changed the World, September 2020.



https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2020/sep/15/covid-farm-animals-and-pandemics-diseases-that-changed-the-world



5) J R Schäfer 1, Y Kawaoka, W J Bean, J Süss, D Senne, R G Webster,

Origin of the pandemic 1957 H2 influenza A virus and the persistence of its possible progenitors in the avian reservoir, PubMed.gov June 1993.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7684877/





6) Grant, Julie, WESA Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Town Raises Stink Over Pig Farm, July 25, 2018.



https://www.wesa.fm/post/pennsylvania-town-raises-stink-over-factory-hog-farm#stream/0





7) NASDAQ, NASDAQ SCORECARD, August 2019.



https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/2019-ipo-scorecard-2019-08-19

8) Gayed, Michael, Seeking Alpha, July 2, 2020.

https://seekingalpha.com/article/4356769-future-of-plant-based-food-stocks





photos:



1) Georges Laraque, vegan NHL player Instagram @georges_laraque

2) Butchers stand in front of a pile of dead cows at the facility for the destruction of animal corpses in Oberding near Munich, Friday, March 21,1997. Bavaria began slaughtering imported cows to prevent an outbreak of mad cow disease. The brains of the cattle were to be examined for bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) Credit: AP