A decade ago, Dr. Greger gave a talk called “How to treat the cause by preventing the emergence of pandemic viruses in the first place”. Dr. Greger gave this talk when he was Public Health Director at the HSUS in Washington DC. In this talk, Dr. Greger shares the fact-based, evidence-driven research that reveals the source of all pandemics. Mediating the impact of corona virus is important, and we’re doing a pretty good job, but it does not get to the root of the problem. Where did this come from in the first place? There will be future pandemics, we will go through this again, if we don’t get to the primary cause and make changes. The rub is this: the cause is pretty darn clear as you will learn here and in more detail in Dr. Greger’s talk, but because it threatens global markets, it is being suppressed. This is not conspiracy theory. This is evidence-based science. Let’s go back a few decades…
The AIDS virus was discovered in 1981 when the CDC released a tiny bulletin about 5 men in LA dying with a strange cluster of symptoms. Aids has since killed 25 million people. We know how it spread, but where did AIDS come from in the first place? SARS, Ebola, and many more emerging diseases emerged from the same general source and yet the public is largely unaware of the source. Why? Yes, we hear about the scrambling for containment and medical researchers working on vaccines, but what about the source? Emerging pandemics are not random accidents! Nor are they curses from God. Let’s wake up and look carefully at what’s going on here. If we don’t, pandemics will be the new normal.
Epidemic diseases are not natural. Humans have been on the planet for millions of years and through most of that history, there were zero epidemics; no one got measles or small pox. Epidemics first started 10,000 years ago with the domestication of animals. When we brought animals into the barnyard, they brought their diseases with them. In his Pulitzer Prize winning book Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond examines the history of harmful and deadly germs and microbes from livestock that led to epidemic diseases that wiped out populations in astounding numbers. Shouldn’t we be talking about this more?
Yes, humans had been carnivores for tens of thousands of years, but we had not lived consistently close to animals. Instead we hunted animals in the animal’s natural habitat and lived apart from them. Then people brought cows and sheep into their barnyards and along with them came their Rubeola virus which tuned into measles. Measles is now mostly benign but in the last 150 years it has killed over 200 million people. All those deaths can be traces back just a few hundred generations to the domestication of cattle. Small pox came from camel pox, pigs brought whooping cough, chickens, typhoid fever. Farming ducks brought influenza. Before the domestication of ducks, no one ever got the flu. Even the common cold comes from horses. When horses were wild, they did not have the opportunity to sneeze into human faces. Humans radically changing the way animals live on the planet is the root cause of emerging epidemics.
in his book Guns, Germs and Steel, Professor Diamond poses a powerful question: Why did the diseases of the European settlers wipe out 95% of native populations, but there were no diseases from native peoples that wiped out European settlers? That is because there were no plagues in the native tribes; they did not capture and breed animals in captivity. They hunted, yes. But they allowed the animals to live their natural life and they lived separately. So while people were dying of plagues by the millions in Europe, none were dying with these diseases in the native populations. The connection between the rise of infectious disease and humans living in close quarters with animals is scientifically documented by several sources. But we did get a handle on this for a while. We were doing relatively well with infectious disease from the 1930’s to the mid 70’s. We had penicillin, we cured polio, we felt unstoppable! Why were epidemics on the decline then and why are they rising at alarming rates now?
It is because we have intensified our harvesting of animals a alarming rates. We have intensified our encroachment on their habitat at alarming rates. We are messing with the web of life in radical ways and ignoring the consequences. In 1975 lime disease was first recognized in Connecticut. It has since spread across all states effecting over 100,000 Americans. They tell us it comes from a bacteria-infested dear tick. But the primary host of this tick is the white-footed mouse. Just 100 years ago, the ticks themselves were not a problem. We’ve been sharing the woods with them forever. But when suburban sprawl chopped up woodlands into sub divisions scaring away foxes and bobcats that fed on the mice, the mouse population boomed. so we have more mice, more ticks and more disease. This is just one of countless examples of how humans are changing the way animals live.
Not only are we encroaching on their habitat, we are mass-harvesting wild animals from forests and jungles, cramming them into filthy cages and shipping them all over the world. When Argentina mowed down rain forest to beef up cattle production, several lethal viruses swept across the continent. In Africa, logging roads carve deep into the jungle and crews harvest wild animals to export around the world thus exposing humans to a number of new viruses such as Lassa and Ebola. The crews feed on bush meat including primates. The leading theory on the emergence of AIDS is that it came from direct exposure to blood, fluids and flesh from butchering and consuming primates. This has been going on at increasing rates for decades. Something’s gotta give. Currently, over 25% of the African population has the AIDS virus.
But wildlife has been hunted for thousands of years, so why is it a problem now? We have never hunted like this. The level of massive capturing, killing and shipping is rising exponentially. We are cramming wild animals into cramped filthy cages and smuggling them around the world. Often for bizarre fetish-like purposes. The civet cat is hunted to make fox dung coffee. People pay top dollar for coffee beans fished out of the exotic cat’s dung. This brought us the SARS virus. Live animal markets took animal viruses and turned them into spreading killers around the world. Humans are changing the way animals live and contributing to (e.g. causing) the spread of these emerging diseases. We’ve know this for decades. Why isn’t the public being educated about his? Why aren’t governments taking action to change this?
It is not just wild animal harvest that is bringing us new infectious diseases. The intensity of domestic animal production is also a major source of rising epidemics. Never before have we had this feverish demand for pigs and poultry. Now chickens for meat are warehoused in sheds packed with 10’s of thousands of birds. Egg-laying hens are confined in cages in windowless sheds sometimes millions of birds on a single farm. About half of the pigs on the planet are crowded into intensive confinement operations. The stress of these conditions reeks havoc on the animal’s immune systems. When the animal’s immune system is suppressed, this allows what might have been a harmless virus to grow aggressively and quickly becomes invasive. In pig factories in Malaysia, Nipah virus emerged. This is one of the deadliest viruses causing contagious respiratory ailments in humans and killing 40% of those infected. We’ve taken grass-feeding cows from their pastures and turned these herbivores into carnivores and cannibals and now we have mad cow disease. Who is ‘mad’ here?
Even leading health authorities such as WHO (world health organization), FAO (food and agriculture organization), the UN and Animal Health Organization recognize that the way we “handle” livestock and harvest and ship wild animals is the number one risk factor for spreading emerging infectious disease. There is no mystery here. So why aren’t we making changes? It makes no sense to continue this way. Even those who are profiting from this madness will have no safe planet on which to enjoy their spoils if we don’t correct our course. Greed and ignorance have our ship careening toward the rocks. If those “in command” cannot be counted on to change things, who can? You. You and me. How?
Well, markets won’t go down unless demand goes down. Each person’s point of power is through the choices they make each day. Don’t expect the meat industry to help out here. The momentum of the money-making machine keeps them blind to the ugly truth and invested in hiding it from us. Even big pharma makes big bucks on the pills and vaccines that “cure” these epidemics so they are not interested in getting to the root either. It is up to the woke grass roots communities to make the change. Don’t underestimate your ability to make change from your daily choices. Simply moving towards vegetarianism will help. Carefully selecting meat, eggs, and dairy that are locally and sustainable sourced helps. Also, consider that the animal ingredients in the packaged foods we eat most likely come from these intensified confinement factory farms so be selective there and eat less packaged food. Collectively we can change market demand enough to make change. Eating whole foods, mostly plants, and not too much can be our contribution to shifting away from future pandemics and returning the web of life to sustainable balance.