Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
emerged, a rate unprecedented in the history of medicine. If this
trend continues, the U.S. Institute of Medicine fears we may soon
face a “catastrophic storm of microbial threats.”
Medical historians describe this time in which we now live as the
“age of the emerging plagues.” Never in medical history have so
many new diseases appeared in so short a time—and almost all of
them have come from animals. Animals were domesticated 10,000
years ago, though. What's changed around the world in recent de-
cades to bring this all upon us?
We have been changing the way animals live.
The leading theory as to the emergence of HIV/AIDS, for exam-
ple, is “direct exposure to animal blood and secretions as a result
of hunting, butchering, or other activities (such as consumption of
uncooked contaminated [bush]meat). . . .” The butchering of great
apes to feed the workers of the logging industry in west equatorial
Africa is the most likely origin of the current AIDS crisis. A chimp was
slaughtered a few decades ago and now 25 million people are dead.
At live animal markets in Asia and elsewhere, shoppers can not
only pick up still-live animals who are often confined in cramped,
stressful, unhygienic conditions, but also viruses like SARS, which
spread from these storefront slaughter operations to infect 8,000
people in thirty countries on six continents.
Animal agribusiness took natural herbivores like cows and
sheep and turned them into carnivores and cannibals by feeding
them slaughterhouse waste, blood, and manure. The meat indus-
try then fed people “downers”—animals too sick even to walk—
resulting in the risk of mad cow disease.
Industrial animal agriculture operations feed antibiotics by the
truckload to those animals raised and killed for human consump-
tion. An estimated 70 percent of antibiotics in the United States—
thousands of tons a year—are fed to farm animals just to promote
growth in such stressful and filthy environments. Now there are
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