Quote:
Originally Posted by Spuds
You could say the biggest source of new diseases comes from animal to human transmission (and vice versa). However, a pandemic is directly caused by human travel in cases like covid-19. Additionally, animals used as food are not the only source of new diseases. As such, it seems that reducing global travel and urban living are probably more effective means of reducing the spread of disease in general.
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That is a reactive approach, unless you are for Surrogates-like approach, which would be a proactive approach?
Humans could give viruses to animals, but animals live in far worse conditions than many humans like I described before, so it is far more likely they are giving us something bad, or if we are giving them something bad then it will be a pandemic for them and/or a pandemic that comes back to us. If you put 10,000 people in a gymnasium with dead people around them, with poor air circulation, with sick people around them, with them standing in their own feces and urine, feeding them a poor diet that festers bad bacteria and health, feeding them poor water that is likely contaminated, feeding them antibiotics that kills their natural gut bacteria, etc then you are creating a recipe for disaster. At the very least, we should end factory farming, but that means less profits for the companies and greater costs to the consumer, which means less meat on everyone's tables, so that is a hard proposition for most to consider.
Animals used as food aren't the only source of new diseases, but are they the most likely to be fatal or cause pandemics? Many anthroponotic diseases we have vaccines for, or they are endemic and cause small epidemics. Zoonotic diseases seem to be novel for us, so there is no herd immunity or partial immunity, which allows them to spread. What we have seen in western countries that don't have to deal with bacteria and viruses that stem from poor water and sanitation and that have access to vaccines is the prevalence of emerging zoonotic diseases, which not only cause disease, but also cause death like these modern pandemics: swine and avian flu, ebola, HIV, SARS, etc. We could have people spread out more and avoid each other, but we have seen with COVID that living in a rural area doesn't prevent people from getting hit with the disease, so I don't know how well your plan would work. Logically, considering the former paragraph and analogy, improving the living conditions for the livestock would be a better place to start.