Big Ag, Not Wild Birds, Is What Really Spreads Avian Flu
Bird flu (H5N1) was first identified in chickens on a farm in Scotland in 1959. In 1996 an outbreak occurred on a goose farm in China and spread to humans, killing half of the humans who contracted it. In 2005 bird flu was spread from domestic birds to wild birds who spread it via migration, bringing it to the Americas in 2021. The problem of bird flu is usually presented as one in which a virus infecting wild birds is being brought into domestic bird farms, where it spreads like crazy, harming the birds and threatening the health of humans who have contact with farmed birds. This version of the story seems to be backwards. The evidence shows bird flu as primarily a problem arising from our farming practices that sometimes spills over into wild birds, who are capable of spreading it.
"We’re getting the story of bird flu backward. The way that we farm animals in the U.S. and the world is amplifying costly and potentially deadly pathogens. Stopping this outbreak and preventing future outbreaks means reckoning with a troubling paradox: Food is essential for our health, but the conditions under which we create our food is making us and the animals around us sick."
Industrial animal farming involves overcrowding animals in cramped and unnatural conditions that jeopardize their health, a situation worsened by poor cleanliness (animals are often sitting in their own waste) and the fact that the animals are often genetically similar which makes them susceptible to the same pathogens. These factors together create an environment like a petri dish in which the influenza virus can easily mutate and spread, and that spread isn't limited to just other birds- it can also spread to pigs and cows, allowing it to mutate further. What is particularly dangerous about bird flu spreading to pigs is that their immune systems are similar to those of humans in such a way that when the virus mutates among pig populations it becomes more likely to be dangerous to humans. There is reason to believe this may also be true of cows, but in cows there is the added risk that sick cows tend to be asymptomatic, so the infections are missed. This is basically a problem with the fundamental way that food animals are produced in the US and many other countries.
