NEW! Are My Eggs, Meat and Dairy Safe? Asking the Wrong Questions about Bird Flu

Our very own “Rubber Chicken” and friends, battery hens rescued from a cull during the change in ownership of a factory farm.

In the US, several workers from poultry and dairy farms have tested positive for H5N1, a type of avian influenza or “bird flu”. Millions of chickens and nearly 100 dairy herds over 48 states have been confirmed as affected as of the end of May, 2024.

During the horrific New York COVID outbreak in spring 2020, tens of thousands of people died and the morgues overflowed, and the health authorities had to bring in refrigerator trucks to accommodate the dead. It is estimated that the infection mortality was around 1.4%, with higher mortality in older folks.

H5N1 infections have killed about 50% of the known infected individuals. Even if we estimate that the infection is 10 times higher due to underreporting/testing (as was assumed in the 1.4% figure for the New York outbreak), the mortality rate is still 5% – nearly four times the horrors of New York COVID.

With the current transmission of H5N1 mostly to farm workers, who tend to be younger and relatively healthy, 5% mortality is likely to be a gross underestimate.

To control outbreaks in factory chicken farms – chickens are killed en masse, using horrible methods such as overheating or suffocation.  Not all the chickens die before burial to dispose of their bodies. Some of these factories are very large, up to five million chickens have been killed in this way in a single factory.

If you have read some of my previous articles, you will see my celebration of chickens and their amazing individuality. Their intelligence is impressive, and they display a broad range of emotions including empathy. A variation on the famous “Marshmallow Test” for self-control and delayed gratification, in which kids received a larger reward if they waited – showed that chickens are at about the level of the average four-year-old human. And chickens are capable of drawing logical conclusions that are difficult for the average six-year-old.

Cows and pigs and other farmed animals are no less remarkable, and we are even finally making headway in understanding the rich inner lives and intelligence of fish. The more we learn, the greater our obligation to challenge the status quo.    

When you hear about bird flu – the two questions in the media are mostly: “What is bird flu going to do to the price of my eggs, meat and dairy?” or “Is it safe to eat eggs, meat and dairy?”

The occasional thoughtful journalist will ask: “What can we do to make sure this current outbreak doesn’t become the next global pandemic?”

There is a better question.

“How do we get to the root of the problem?”

Most of our serious infectious diseases spilled over from animals, most often the farm animals we have lived in close proximity with. Today’s factory farms have made the risks much more serious, with millions of animals being raised in cruel and confined conditions where most of the world’s increasingly ineffective antibiotics are being used to keep animals upright and putting on fat for slaughter or producing eggs and dairy at grossly unnatural rates.

Animal agriculture of any kind, not just factory farming, requires a large land base with many pounds of forage and thousands of gallons of water required to produce a single pound of flesh. This pushes farmland and farmers into areas where the risks of “spillover” diseases from wildlife are much higher.

There’s a solution that doesn’t involve torturing animals, risking the food supply, subjecting vulnerable workers to soul-crushing duties, or the prospect of running out of sufficient refrigerator trucks to hold all the bodies from overflowing hospital morgues in a pandemic.

You don’t NEED eggs, milk and dairy regardless of what the agriculture lobby might say as they resist accountability from more thorough testing, or short-term interventions like vaccinations – citing the costs and affordability for consumers (their own profits are not discussed).

You can get your protein and all the other critical nutrients from plants.

There has never been a tastier (or lower cost) way to minimize future pandemics, improve your health as you focus on beans, legumes and other healthy whole foods, and allow millions of acres to grow back into natural habitats for all the world’s amazing diversity of creatures. Now, that’s a solution worth pursuing.