April 23, 2020

The role of factory farms in all this

Guardian - The meat that we eat today overwhelmingly comes from genetically uniform, immunocompromised, and regularly drugged animals lodged by the tens of thousands into buildings or stacked cages – no matter how the meat is labelled...We don’t yet know the full history of the emergence of Covid-19, the particular strain of coronavirus that now threatens us. But with recent pandemic virus threats from influenza viruses such as H1N1 (swine flu) or H5N1 (bird flu) there is no ambiguity: those viruses evolved on chicken and pig factory farms. Genetic analyses have shown that crucial components of H1N1 emerged from a virus circulating in North American pigs. But it is commercial poultry operations that appear to be the Silicon Valley of viral development.

The Hill - First and foremost, in the post-peak period of this pandemic and before another virus emerges, it’s time to shut down an industry that is at the core of this problem: the factory farming of animals and the destruction of natural habitat that makes this industry possible. Doing so would save hundreds of thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars. 

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