Summary
A new H5N1 bird flu variant has become “endemic in cows,” with cases detected in Nevada and Arizona, raising concerns about human transmission.
Experts warn that without intervention, the outbreak will continue, but Trump has cut CDC staff and halted flu vaccination campaigns.
The virus’s spread coincides with a severe flu season, increasing the risk of mutation.
The administration has also stopped sharing flu data with the WHO and shifted its containment strategy away from culling infected poultry, raising fears of inadequate response.
How about we… i dunno… not farm animals? It’s bad for health, it’s bad for the animals, it’s bad for the environment. Every pandemic we’ve ever had has been caused by animal ag. That’s COVID, SARS, MERS, AIDS, etc.
I agree with your first two sentences.
But at least with COVID and AIDS, neither of those are attributed to animal agriculture. They crossed into humans through exposure to animals, but in the case of AIDS that was non-human primates most likely. And in the case of COVID it was most likely bats. But in neither of those instances were those animals part of an agricultural system. In other words they weren’t being farmed
Swine flu, yes absolutely. Aids and COVID? Not so much.
HIV-1 virus exposure was most likely from bushmeat trade. COVID might have as well.
I was aware that COVID most likely came from wet markets. But that’s selling hunted meat.
Animal agriculture is raising animals to eat. Often in confinement.
With bird flu, animal agriculture is a major cause for concern. But that doesn’t mean animal agriculture was the cause of all pandemics.
I guess we could argue that eating meat might be. But I also don’t want to tell folks who are living in poverty in other parts of the world that they can’t hunt for food.
So I feel like the ethical arguments are different too.
Meat is a vector for all pandemics, so the goal should be to create a world where no one ever has to eat meat ever again.
Or where meat can be grown in a lab in controlled conditions.
That’s always going to be vastly more expensive than just eating plants, it’s just not a realistic way to feed everyone. It could really only ever be a sometimes food.
this one. I know it’s a meme in vegan circles but meat really is fucking delicious.
Modern fake meat is not super distinguishable anymore. The stuff you buy at the market I mean, not the stuff that is sold at restaurants even when the brand is same (maybe restaurant cooks just don’t know?)
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Nope.
Agriculture is the raising of food. Rather that’s vegetables or animals.
Hunting animals and selling them in a market isn’t agriculture.
And if you had argued that killing animals and eating their meat is the source of diseases, well again that’s not how AIDS started. And folks are catching bird flu from their cats bringing it in the house.
So animal agriculture certainly is one vector of transmission. And factory farming especially is a big issue, because animals are often in confinement where disease spreads easily, and then transfers into people.
But no, all pandemics did not come from animal agriculture. Or even eating meat.
I was under the impression primate bush meat consumption was believed to be the origin of HIV, is that not the case anymore?
According to (The National Institute of Health Library of Medicine)[https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3234451/] you are possibly correct. It most likely jumped to people from hunting bush meat, but it’s possible it could also have made the jump to people in a livestock setting where someone was raising monkeys for sale as pets or lab animals. Getting bit by an infected animal could be enough to transmit the virus.
Curious about your diet, and where you get your food? Also curious how that scales to 350 million people (to feed the US)?
I’m not remotely implying what we’re doing, as a society, is right or sustainable but it’s super easy to just say “Just stop doing bad things”.
Solutions, at scale are quite complicated and nuanced. Private companies that grow our food at scale now will only participate if it’s profitable.
Also, if you’re not sustainably growing your own food, are you not just like the rest of us (Part of the problem)? I know I don’t have the land, or time to grow my own food.
Sticking our head in the sand (current administration) is definitely not gonna turn out well, so I’m guessing there’s some fun times ahead! <sigh>
Mostly beans, wheat, and oats, in different form factors. More salads.
Your body only requires a tiny amount of protein and that’s also the easiest thing to replace.
It scales far better than animal-agriculture. Eating plants directly is massively more efficient compared to growing crops feed where most of the energy is lost in the process
https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets
https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/14/8/1614/html
You think scaling plant based food is harder than scaling a meat industry? I’m a meat eater but come on… It is not hard to get to place mentally that humans could easily live on plant based foods. People choose to eat meat because it’s what they believe to be is delicious and what their parents raised them on.
Maybe DOGE should cut all the subsidies the meat industry gets, upwards of $40 billion and we can see what the real price of meat should cost.
Lol they aren’t trying to actually reduce expenses. If they did there’s clear places to go (we don’t seem to want to use our military, why do we spend 1/3 of our national budget on it?).
The goal is to inject confusion and uncertainty into everyone’s lives and to pwn the libs who think government is capable of doing good.
That’s not at all what I said. The meat Industry already exists and is scaled profitable, even if it’s terrible for our planet.
I said to get any scale of another version, it’s going to have to be as equally profitable or corporations are not going to go for it.
Sustainable, scalable and profitable.
Ah sorry for the misunderstanding. Profits over everything sigh :(
The unfortunate world we live in
I try to buy local fruit and veg only. Fun fact: if we all went vegan, we could free up 70-80% of the land currently being used for animal ag. We could rewild that land and still have excess food. We currently grow enough plants to feed 15B people, but we feed that to the animals instead.
a lot of the plant matter fed to animals is parts of plants we can’t or won’t eat.
and a lot of the land used isn’t crop land, but grazing land
and they’re is no reason to believe the land would ever be rewilded.
It’s mostly corn.
Granted, it’s not processed in a way to be fit for human consumption.
But still, most of it is corn. Some of it is corn cobs and stalks but most of it is kernels.
Outside of that, other grains are very common. Oats for example.
So, they are right. Raising plants to feed animals so we can eat the animals is less efficient than raising plants for us to eat. Especially in regards to cattle. Which is one of the most inefficient things in the US food system. The only reason it’s so cheap is because of subsidation, both of the cattle and the corn that’s grown to feed them.
And countries much larger than our own survive on rice and beans just fine. As queerminest eluded to in her comment.
As far as local food, I have a co-op. So I buy local vegetables and fruits when I can.
if that were the situation, you might be right. but since we actually feed livestock mostly crop seconds and byproducts, it’s actually a conservation of resources in a lot of situations, with minimal competition with human food sources
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2211912416300013
https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1713820115
your shepon paper shows a great deal of spinach being fed to chickens. why would it be fed to chickens if it were suitable for human consumption? I don’t actually know, but my guess is that it is not suitable for human consumption, and that is why it is fed to chickens. that’s a conservation of resources. the potatoes fed to cattle are likely the same.
this paper doesn’t discuss this discrepancy at all. I have to say I don’t find the analysis very compelling.
do you have the full papers? I can’t really examine these claims from the links you provided.
you clipped this out of the abstract, but it’s highly relevant to what I’ve been saying: this is a byproduct of pressing soybeans for oil. if we didn’t feed it to livestock, it would be industrial waste.
When we look at the most common extraction method for soybean oil (using hexane solvents), soybean meal [feed to farm animals] is still the driver of demand
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0926669017305010
This is even more true of other methods like expelling which is still somewhat commonly used
https://www.mdpi.com/2077-0472/9/5/87
Even other extraction methods being explored in research as well don’t have soybean oil as the main driver of demand
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jasreen-Sekhon/publication/330375817_Economic_Feasibility_of_Soybean_Oil_Production_by_Enzyme-Assisted_Aqueous_Extraction_Processing/links/5c49d531a6fdccd6b5c586b6/Economic-Feasibility-of-Soybean-Oil-Production-by-Enzyme-Assisted-Aqueous-Extraction-Processing.pdf
beef cattle spend most of their life grazing.
Where they emit the most methane and still are given supplementary feed. There’s also not enough land to sustain a grazing only production system with the massive demand we have
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aad401/pdf
no one said they are exclusively grass fed, not that we should be doing that
it’s not mostly kernels. livestock are fed the entire plant, and the kernels are a slim minority of the weight.
Even just replacing 25-50% meat with plants in the US would have incredible outcomes for the people. I guarantee we would be a far healthier population. The cheap meat being served up to Americans is not good.
Still results in overall reductions in arable-land usage. Even more than just eliminating 100% of food-waste
https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1713820115
Grazing usage isn’t free from harms either
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/16/most-damaging-farm-products-organic-pasture-fed-beef-lamb
in didn’t say it’s free from harms. I’m saying we aren’t using that land to grow crops.
My point is, you try to… I try to also, but in the dead of winter there’s no a local fruit and veggies. I’m also not vegan/vegetarian, I eat meat. Fish, and chicken primarily but I don’t raise either, so I have to rely on someone else to do that for me.
We do actually get probably half our eggs from someone at my wife’s work, and some. fruits and vegetables at the farmers market down the street in the summer. But they’re closed now and have been most of winter.
It’s harder than just saying “just stop” was my point. I’d love to be part of the solution where I can but there’s zero chance of me not eating meat if it’s available.
It’s worth noting that environmentally, where the food comes from matters far far less than what you eat. Production emissions are far larger than any transportation emissions
https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local
You’re curious how beans and rice scales to 350 million people?
Apparently he’s confused by the idea that we can eat the stuff we used to feed to cows.
Vegan here. Sticking to the two questions you asked before you got lost in scope creep and logical fallacy: I get my food from the supermarket, mostly. And it scales way better than animal ag because farming plants requires radically less resources per calorie than farming animals.
Just like most other positive decisions in the world, it’s not revolutionary on it’s own. Nor is it aiming to be, nor does it need to be.
I don’t disagree with your general sentiment, but what I see as responses here are often empty responses… Just the obvious “we should stop being terrible arbiters of our planet”. Like no shit, but it’s hard and MOST humans are not gonna ever be vegan/vegetarian unless forced.
What a strange thought. How would you define the driving factor behind any food consumption other than forced?
Maybe. What about you, though?
I am 100% in that category. I have some aspirations to be in a lifestyle where I catch a lot of my own fish but zero desire to move off animal protein to a vegetarian lifestyle.