| It's not farfetched that a vegetarian diet could have prevented this deadly disease. The severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) now spreading across the globe is apparently just one more example of a situation in which a virus has leaped from animals to people. Many viruses are harmless to animals but mutate and become deadly when they infect human beings.
SARS evolved in southern China, where 80 million people share living space with the ducks, chickens, pigs, shrimp, and carp they eat. Chicken waste is fed to pigs. Pig waste is dumped into ponds in which shrimp and fish are raised for food. All the animals are crowded into small spaces where viruses thrive. One scientist called this area "a complete soup of chemicals and viruses." Another explained, "A virus gets into a duck, it jumps to the pig. It mutates, the pig excretes it and humans can become infected."
The World Health Organization reports that, like SARS, the annual influenzas that sicken and kill thousands every year almost always originate in animals in southern China and Hong Kong.
All this disease comes from people's desire to consume meat and to farm animals in small spaces. The stress of intensive farming promotes illness, which is why massive doses of antibiotics are put into animal feed on Western factory farms-antibiotics which, in turn, lower human resistance to disease. SARS is thought to be a virulent form of coronavirus. A top Canadian researcher believes that "the coronavirus in animals may be associated with the 'shipping fever' pigs and cattle get when they are stressed by the crowded transport situations they are in when they are sent to feedlots before slaughter."- The influenza epidemic of 1918 originated in pigs. It swept the globe, killing 20 million people. By 1920, nearly every American family had lost one member to this flu.
- The Hong Kong avian flu of 1997 jumped from chickens to people, sickening hundreds and killing six. To stop the spread of the disease, 1.5 million chickens were slaughtered.
Journal of Food Protection.
SARS does not come close to delivering the tally of death, sickness, and tragedy that meat-related heart disease, cancer, strokes, high blood pressure, and other ailments cause.
According to Dr. T. Colin Campbell, nutritional researcher at Cornell University and director of the largest epidemiological study in history, "The vast majority of all cancers, cardiovascular diseases, and other forms of degenerative illness can be prevented ... simply by adopting a plant-based diet."
And the cost to animals is beyond measure. Crammed together in tiny spaces, living above their own waste, never breathing fresh air or feeling the sunshine on their backs, they never know a moment's joy or contentment.
The solution is to stop treating animals as though they have no feelings or needs. The farmed-animal industry will change only when we force it to by refusing to buy its products. Going vegan will save animals' lives-and it could save yours, too. |
