Exclusive: ‘Zoonoses often take that route… and the more you have of a thing, the more that thing is going to be the likely conveyor,’ says UN environment chief

https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/coronavirus-meat-animal-farming-pandemic-disease-wet-markets-a9505626.html

Industrial animal farming has caused most new infectious diseases in humans in the past decade – and risks starting new pandemics as animal markets have done, experts are warning.

Experts from both the UN and the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) have pinpointed animals or food of animal origin as a starting point for emerging diseases, such as Covid-19, which has killed more than 270,000 people worldwide.

And a separate report has cautioned that replacing Asia’s open-air slaughter markets with factory farming for meat would create similarly dangerous conditions for highly virulent flu strains to breed.

Valentina Rizzi, an expert in disease at the EFSA, said: “The diseases transmitted directly or indirectly from animals – including livestock – to humans are called zoonoses. A big proportion of all infectious diseases in humans are originating from animals, and more specifically the majority of emerging new infection in humans in the last 10 years really come from animals or food of animal origin.”

Inger Andersen, executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) told One Earth: “The virus usually originates in the wild, is transmitted often by wild birds, bats etc into livestock – domesticated animals.

“We see it more frequently in pigs than poultry but you do see it elsewhere, too, in other animals. Of course we can’t deny that these zoonoses often take that route – this we know from science.

“And the probability is the more you have of a thing, the more that thing is going to be the likely conveyor.”

The UNEP warned in 2016 of new diseases from animals, amplified by the world’s rising population of livestock for meat and dairy.

Ms Andersen said the more we as consumers demand protein from livestock and meat, the more the market would respond.

The experts spoke out as governments worldwide are facing a clamour of calls to ban live animal slaughter markets, such as that in Wuhan, linked to the emergence of the coronavirus. The World Health Organization has been pressured to intervene.

The Independent‘s campaign Stop the Wildlife Trade is calling for the trade to be strictly controlled and regulated.

Viruses such as Covid-19 have been linked to street stalls in southeast Asia and India, where animals are susceptible to disease because the stress caused by such close confinement and the sight of others being slaughtered is believed to weaken their immune systems.

A new report, called Is the next Pandemic on our Plate?, says the similarly crowded conditions of industrial agriculture play a key role in the emergence of pathogens.

Peter Stevenson, chief policy adviser at Compassion in World Farming and author of the document, said policymakers “must resist arguments that wet markets should be replaced by factory farming, or that industrial farming is needed to provide cheap food to feed the growing world population”.

The paper sets out ways to switch to keeping animals in “health-oriented” systems in which the wellbeing of the animal is prioritised so stress and disease vulnerability are reduced.

Such systems would also mean less soil degradation, water pollution, biodiversity loss and deforestation, Mr Stevenson argues.

Food should be regarded as a public good, not as a tradeable commodity, according to the report, which suggests economic policies that would allow for sustainable agriculture and a “nutritious, equitable” food system.

“Maintaining a flawed global food system can and will lead to further pandemics,” he said.

Earlier this week researchers led by the University of Sheffield and Bath warned that intensive farming, involving overuse of antibiotics, high numbers of animals, and low genetic diversity are hotbeds for pathogens to spread.

WAV Comment – how disgustingly sick is this ?; that thousand, maybe will be tens of thousands of innocent, living (if you can call the factory farm system that) animals suffering life long incarceration in intensive farming systems; being pumped full of antibiotics, and then finally hauled out of their bars and destined for crappy virus spreading meat processing facilities are now being killed; chopped up into little bits, mixed with wood chippings and spread all over the land !

“An incident management team that includes staff from the Board of Animal Health is overseeing the composting operation to ensure the compost pile is constructed correctly. Proper construction should eliminate the attraction of flies or scavengers, and should not emit an odor, Crusan said”.

Another example of what the ‘meat eaters’ are enforcing on everyone, including those who find this issue as sick as we do. Talking of sick; lets hope that everything goes as the Board of Animal Health suggest and that citizens don’t get sick.

Wood chippers employed to help compost thousands of excess hogs near Worthington plant

https://www.twincities.com/2020/05/06/wood-chippers-employed-to-help-compost-thousands-of-excess-hogs-near-worthington-plant/

ROUND LAKE, Minn. — A parcel of land in Nobles County has been transformed into a major composting operation for euthanized hogs coming from the crippled JBS pork processing plant in nearby Worthington, as well as hogs from area farmers.

Mike Crusan, communications director with the Minnesota Board of Animal Health, said delivery of hog carcasses to the southwest Minnesota site began over the weekend. The parcel of land can accommodate the delivery of up to 2,000 head per day, though it hasn’t reached peak capacity at this point.

JBS announced last week it could euthanize 3,000 head of market-weight hogs per day because they couldn’t be processed before they grew too large for slaughter and packaging. The JBS plant in Worthington shut down temporarily because of an outbreak of COVID-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus, among workers at the plant. On Wednesday, it resumed operations but at reduced levels.

Crusan said the site northwest of Round Lake would not have been chosen if there were any potential environmental risks.

An incident management team that includes staff from the Board of Animal Health is overseeing the composting operation to ensure the compost pile is constructed correctly. Proper construction should eliminate the attraction of flies or scavengers, and should not emit an odor, Crusan said.

“It should just be, to the naked eye, a pile of wood chips out there,” he said. “The wood chips over the top of the pile, beneath the pile and all around it are going to be keeping all of those odors and all of those things contained as the microbes inside the pile do their work.”

The Minnesota Pork Producers Association is working with the team to establish three other composting sites in the state.

“They are trying to find other areas where there are congregations of large swine operations so they can better serve those people with a centralized site,” Crusan said, adding that farmers will have the option to deliver hog carcasses to those sites or compost on their own property.

The hog carcasses delivered to the Nobles County site will be run through the chipper simultaneously with the wood material — a new concept in the hog industry.

“This whole approach … began being evaluated in composting just within the last year because of African swine fever,” Crusan said. “The pork industry nationwide was studying ways of effectively composting mass carcasses if we were to get that in the United States.”

Chipping the hog carcasses with the carbon material was studied in the Carolinas, Crusan said.

“This is one of the ways we know that we can effectively compost and probably speed up the composting process,” he said.

Crusan said they don’t yet know how many days it will take for the hogs to be fully composted, though it will be considerably shorter than the 60 days it takes for a fully intact carcass to be composted.

Once the composting process is complete, the material can either be spread over the land or incorporated, adding nutrient-rich material to the soil.

A third-party contractor was hired to operate the chipping equipment and build the compost pile in Nobles County. The composting service is being offered to farmers at no cost to them, other than trucking the carcasses to the site.

Hog producers are welcome to contact the Minnesota Board of Animal Health with questions regarding composting hog carcasses by calling 651-296-2942 or emailing animalhealth@state.mn.us.

The agency also has a guide for carcass disposal on its website, mn.gov/bah/carcass-disposal.