- 01 Apr 2020 11:01
#15080582
"Take flu, a disease that is considered to have high pandemic potential, having caused an estimated 15 pandemics in the past 500 years. “There is clearly a link between the emergence of highly pathogenic avian influenza viruses and intensified poultry production systems,” says spatial epidemiologist Marius Gilbert...
The reasons, many of which were documented in Wallace’s 2016 book Big Farms Make Big Flu, include the density with which chickens, turkeys or other poultry are packed into factory farms, and the fact that the birds in a given farm tend to be near genetic clones of one another – having been selected over decades for desirable traits such as lean meat. If a virus gets introduced into such a flock, it can race through it without meeting any resistance in the form of genetic variants that prevent its spread."
"In a paper published in 2018, Gilbert’s group reviewed historical “conversion events”, as they call them – when a not-very-pathogenic avian flu strain became much more dangerous, and found that most of them had occurred in commercial poultry systems, and more frequently in wealthy countries." (meaning not just China)
This gives us an opportunity, he says, to question our lifestyle choices – because chicken isn’t cheap if it costs a million lives – and vote for politicians who hold agribusiness to higher standards of ecological, social and epidemiological sustainability."
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/28/is-factory-farming-to-blame-for-coronavirus
The reasons, many of which were documented in Wallace’s 2016 book Big Farms Make Big Flu, include the density with which chickens, turkeys or other poultry are packed into factory farms, and the fact that the birds in a given farm tend to be near genetic clones of one another – having been selected over decades for desirable traits such as lean meat. If a virus gets introduced into such a flock, it can race through it without meeting any resistance in the form of genetic variants that prevent its spread."
"In a paper published in 2018, Gilbert’s group reviewed historical “conversion events”, as they call them – when a not-very-pathogenic avian flu strain became much more dangerous, and found that most of them had occurred in commercial poultry systems, and more frequently in wealthy countries." (meaning not just China)
This gives us an opportunity, he says, to question our lifestyle choices – because chicken isn’t cheap if it costs a million lives – and vote for politicians who hold agribusiness to higher standards of ecological, social and epidemiological sustainability."
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/28/is-factory-farming-to-blame-for-coronavirus
Facts have a well known liberal bias