[Tame JCVI member
Vivienne Parry
defending factory farming. No, that wouldn't do much for the
vaccine industry! Funny isn't it, how domestic pets are
never mentioned--wouldn't do to cull all those Labradors! That
wouldn't look too good in the Shires and Westminster. What
a great stroke of luck that pesky flu viruses don't linger in
cats and dogs! Or budgies! See: Toxic air
[2009 May] 'The smell is so awful that I start
to vomit': Is this farm the Ground Zero of swine flu?
] Don’t blame
factory farming for pandemics
Vivienne Parry is a science writer and broadcaster
The website of the World Health Organisation refers calmly
to something called influenza A(H1N1). But the world’s media
saw the name swine flu, and perhaps not surprisingly homed
in on an intensive pig-rearing facility in Mexico as the
outbreak’s source—wrongly, as it turned out. Underneath this
reaction lay a feeling that industrial agriculture makes
modern pandemics more likely—even though there is almost no
evidence for this at all.
The British consumer is usually ambivalent about animal
welfare, condemning battery chickens but buying them
nonetheless. The BSE crisis in the 1990s led to the
slaughter of 4.5m cattle and made public some of the
(undoubtedly unsavoury) practices involved in making cheap
protein for humans, not least feeding the remains of cattle
to other cattle. Since then the environmental movement, with
its simplistic view of farming—small equals good, big equals
bad—has joined with popular campaigns by Jamie Oliver and
Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall to spread a new hostility
towards large-scale farming. To many it seemed intuitively
right that something as nasty as a pandemic flu must,
somehow, have come from this heart of darkness.
But the facts tell a different story. A study by the
respected US Centre for Disease Control and Prevention seems
to show that swine flu came from a “triple reassortment” of
different flu virus genes—pig, avian and human—and that the
pig elements also include a genetic contribution from a
European strain of swine flu. Since European pigs rarely, if
ever, travel as far as Mexico, the reassortment vessel—the
physical body in which these various viruses combined—was
likely to be human, not swine. World Health Organisation
(WHO) officials think that the first case may have been a
young boy in southern California, with no pig contact at
all. Ultimately, human beings are more likely to have given
influenza A(H1N1) to pigs than the other way round.
Even anti-factory farming groups who might admit that
intensive farming wasn’t at fault this time still insist
that it is a pandemic accident in the making. They will
speculate openly about whether one can ever really trust the
word of global food conglomerates, such as the world’s
largest pork producer, Smithfield Foods, the owners of the
suspect Mexican pig factory. The implication is that a
return to cottage production would limit diseases, and
improve the health of both man and beast.
Of course, there are bad intensive producers that cut
corners by selling battery chickens as free range, packing
pigs so closely that they can’t move or adding excessive
pink colouring to farmed salmon. But any number of closely
gathered animals, human or not, present an opportunity to a
microbe. The movement of animals to market always creates
opportunities for infection, as we saw with foot-and-mouth
disease. Whether inside, as commuters crammed in trains or
pigs in rearing units, or outside as festival-goers or
free-range chickens, merely having more than one animal in
the same place increases the likelihood of disease,
particularly a novel one.
Even keeping each pig isolated wouldn’t solve the problem.
It would interact with us, and we carry disease too. If it
grubs in the ground it finds soil-based bacteria and
parasites, while other animals—mice, birds, or foxes for
instance—also cast off viruses and bacteria. Despite what
activists say about modern factory farming, it’s actually
much more likely that a future flu pandemic will begin where
humans share their cooking and living quarters with domestic
animals, as they do in much of the developing world. Such
circumstances were probably the cause of the 261 deaths to
date from H5N1 influenza, or avian flu.
Good large-scale producers are only too aware that a virus
in their flocks presents the greatest possible threat to
their bottom line and pull out all the stops to vaccinate,
monitor and prevent the spread of any infection. They know
too that ignoring animal welfare regulations risks
reputation and livelihood. This is especially true in
Britain, where BSE left behind some of the world’s fiercest
regulations, along with frequent unannounced inspection by
officials from Defra. Big supermarkets also regularly
inspect their suppliers—whether their farms are in Britain,
Thailand or Brazil—in an effort to stop the reputational
risk of disease in their supply chain. And even major pig
breeders, such as the Pig Improvement Company, invest in
health programmes or, like Smithfield, develop their own
swine vaccines.
Cottage industries might look nice, but smallholders are
less skilled at spotting disease. Ineffective attempts at
at-home treatment often mean that help only arrives when an
animal is already sick, or not at all given that a vet’s
bill often exceeds an animal’s purchase price many times
over. Avoiding treatment in this way allows infection to
entrench, and animals near death may be taken to market and
sold. In parts of the world where food is scarce, carcasses
may not be burnt, but left for scavengers, increasing the
risk of cross-species transmission.
Of the 40 or so new diseases that have appeared around the
world in the last three decades, almost all have come from
animals and jumped to human beings, and all have begun in
“cottage” conditions. None, unless you count BSE, were
caused by intensive production of animals.
So, while our relationship with animals is likely to be the
source of any future pandemic, intensive farming is much
less likely to be the culprit than the cottage production so
many of us admire. Good and bad keepers of animals will
remain, whether they are small or large-scale rearers. The
important point is that all must be scrupulous in their
husbandry.
The final irony is that making a flu vaccine involves the
use of hens’ eggs. One dose needs one egg to make it. Even
now, vaccine manufacturers are building up flocks,
maintained inside to avoid any cross contamination with wild
birds, to produce the 1bn eggs that will be needed for the
1bn flu vaccines that are set to be produced for H1N1.
Without intensive production in conditions of immaculate
cleanliness, we would have no flu vaccines. And we don’t
have cottage farmers to thank for that.
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