The link between meat and pandemics
U.S. Army Spc. Reagan Long and Pfc. Naomi Velez register people at a COVID-19 Mobile Testing Center in Glen Island Park, New Rochelle, New York. Image credit: New York National Guard
Ed Winters, or Earthling Ed, as he’s known on Instagram, recently posted a video that received more than a million views and thousands of comments. The message of the six-minute video can be boiled down to this: “Many of the world’s deadliest outbreaks, including COVID-19, SARS, and bird flu, are directly linked to the exploitation of animals by humans.”
Winters, a British animal rights activist, filmmaker, and lecturer, is not alone in making this claim. The Counter, a food system-focused online publication, recently interviewed experts about the many potential connections between meat production and the pandemic. A March article in The Guardian investigated the relationship between diseases like COVID-19 and global pig and poultry production. Last week, the European Union’s health chief told Reuters that there is "strong evidence that the way meat is produced, not only in China, contributed to COVID-19."
The origins of COVID-19 are, at present, still unclear. We know COVID-19 is a zoonotic virus, meaning it can jump from animals to humans, and that it first circulated among bats. We know that many of the initial reported patients were linked to a seafood and live animal market in China. We don’t yet know how or when exactly the disease made the leap from animals to humans. However, there is a growing consensus that our demand for animal protein is a risk factor for pandemics like COVID-19.
a breeding ground for zoonotic diseases
An estimated three out of four new or emerging infectious diseases originate in animals, and three out of five infectious diseases are spread by animals, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Because of the prevalence of zoonotic diseases—those that normally exist in animals but can infect humans—researchers have long worked to understand the risk factors for transmission from animals to humans. The greatest risk occurs in “direct or indirect human exposure to animals, their products (meat, milk, eggs), and/or their environments,” states the World Health Organization (WHO).
“Both farmed and caged wild animals create the perfect breeding ground for zoonotic diseases.”
Our appetite for meat and dairy causes more frequent contact with animals for a variety of reasons, as outlined in a 2004 report from the WHO. Most obviously, increasing demand for animal protein is responsible for practices like live animal markets, wildlife consumption, and factory farming. There’s also evidence that deforestation, driven in large part by the demand for more grazing land, brings humans in more frequent contact with the wild animals who lose their habitats. (A Stanford study published this month in Springer found this to be true in western Uganda.) In addition, the world’s growing appetite for meat has increased global trade of livestock and more exotic wildlife, allowing zoonotic diseases to travel faster and farther.
“Both farmed and caged wild animals create the perfect breeding ground for zoonotic diseases,” says Liz Specht, Associate Director of Science & Technology at The Good Food Institute. “Extraordinarily high population densities, prolonged heightened stress levels, poor sanitation, and unnatural diets create a veritable speed-dating event for viruses to rendezvous with a weakened human host and transcend the species barrier.”
So while the coronavirus’s jump to humans was linked to a seafood and live animal market in Wuhan, China, it could just as easily have originated in Argentina, England, North Carolina, or any other place where employees of factory farms and slaughterhouses work alongside large groups of live animals in cramped, stressful, and often unsanitary conditions.
“It’s easy for those of us in the Western world to shake our heads at the live wildlife markets in China,” writes Paul Shapiro, CEO and cofounder of The Better Meat Co. “But what’s more difficult is to be honest with ourselves about what kinds of pandemics we may be brewing through our own risky animal-use practices.”
factory farming is “a perfect storm environment”
Physician and best-selling author Michael Greger wrote about the threat of factory farming years ago when he published Bird Flu: A Virus of Our Own Hatching in 2006. He calls factory farming “a perfect storm environment” for pandemics. “If you actually want to create global pandemics,” he warns, “then build factory farms.”
History has validated Greger. The 1918 flu, which killed around 50 million people, is thought to have originated on a poultry farm in Kansas. The 1997 H5N1 bird flu likely started on Chinese chicken farms. More recently, a 2015 bird flu outbreak on North American chicken farms killed more than 32 million birds in 16 states, causing egg and poultry prices to skyrocket, though thankfully the disease never made the leap to humans. Earlier this year, both India and China reported additional bird flu outbreaks on poultry farms that have not yet infected humans.
“If you actually want to create global pandemics, then build factory farms.”
“There is clearly a link between the emergence of highly pathogenic avian influenza viruses and intensified poultry production systems,” says Belgian spatial epidemiologist Marius Gilbert. Gilbert’s group published a study in 2018 that looked at so-called conversion events, whereby bird flu strains suddenly became highly pathogenic, as well as “reassortment events,” when at least two different viruses combine by exchanging genetic material. These novel viruses can cause pandemics by appearing suddenly in populations that have no immunity.
Between 1959 and 2018, his group identified 39 conversion events and 127 reassortments. All but two conversion events took place on commercial poultry farms in industrialized economies in the US and Europe. The majority of the 127 reassortments took place in Asian countries where poultry production was transitioning from backyard to factory farms.
The risks are similarly high on high-density pig farms. The 2009 H1N1 swine flu is thought to have originated on North American pig farms before jumping to humans. The current African swine fever (ASF) outbreak has already slashed China’s pig population by a third, killing some 100 million. At present, ASF only occurs in animals, but a mutation in the virus could change this, or even increase the severity of the disease.
“Swapping host species often allows pathogens to take a more sinister turn, causing severe illness or death in their new host despite only triggering mild symptoms in their animal reservoir,” says Liz Specht.
So as we work to contain the current outbreak of COVID-19, the next pandemic could be developing on our factory farms.
the next pandemic
Before launching his campaign video, Ed Winters posted an oversimplified and since-removed graphic that stated: “COVID-19 was started by eating animals.” This post caught the attention of Matthew Brown, a writer at USA Today, who fact-checked Ed Winters’ post, rating the claim that COVID-19 was “caused by eating animals” as “partly false.”
Eating meat is not technically the problem, Brown argues. Zoonotic diseases are made possible by contact between humans and live animals. In other words, the risks inherent in high-density animal farming make Winters’ assertion also partly true.
Meanwhile, Americans' consumption of meat and poultry hit a record high of 222 pounds per person in 2018, a reminder of how difficult it will be to change our eating habits, even if doing so could help protect us from another pandemic.
Tia Schwab is a former Stone Pier Press News Fellow from Austin, TX.
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