Another Disease Outbreak Threatens U.S. Pigs, But Big Ag Would Rather Talk About Bacon Prices

by Jonathan Latham

By Martha Rosenberg

There’s a lot the industrial factory farm industry prefers to keep consumers in the dark about, including what happens when millions of confined, stressed out animals with weakened immune systems are exposed to disease.

What’s the latest food animal pandemic Big Meat has been trying to keep out of the news? African swine fever (ASF), caused by the African swine fever virus (ASFV), a disease that in 2019 killed one-fourth of the world’s pigs, including half of all China’s factory farm pigs.

So far, mainstream media’s coverage of ASF has focused almost exclusively on economic issues, including the disease’s potential impact on global trade. Questions about the pandemic disease potentials of intensive animal agriculture are skirted.

ASF originated in East Africa and reached Eastern Europe in 2007, where it has remained. Since ASF’s outbreak in China in 2018, in which half of the country’s pigs died and another 1 million were culled, ASF has spread to Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, North Korea, the Philippines, more of eastern Europe and even Belgium.

Pig Gestation Crates

“It’s not a question of whether ASF reaches American shores, but when,” write Thomas Parsons, professor at the School of Veterinary Medicine, and Scott Michael Moore, China Program Director at the University of Pennsylvania, in the Hill.

“Should the virus enter the U.S., your future as a pork producer would radically change,” warns Pork Business.

In acute cases, the ASF virus causes death in one to eight days. This allows the spread of the disease as animals and their meat are sold, either deliberately or not.

This is not the first time that Big Meat has kept the facts about major animal pandemics away from consumers, who likely would be turned off to industrially produced meat if they knew the truth. The factory farm meat industry also suppressed the facts about porcine epidemic diarrhea virus (PEDv) and avian flu.

By 2014, PEDv had killed 10 percent of pigs confined in factory farms in the U.S.

The PEDv scourge was so devastating, a Kentucky farm fed dead pigs to other pigs in an attempt to induce “immunity” in survivors.

To combat PEDv the government gave $11.1 million of our tax dollars to private farmers who were “producers of infected herds.”

Here’s a cheaper idea: How about giving the animals fresh air, space to move and no drugs?

From 2014 through mid-2015, 48 million chickens and turkeys were killed in the U.S. to prevent the spread of bird flu, and to protect farmer profits. Yet despite the mass murder spree, the disease resurfaced in 2017.

It’s easy to see why. To prevent the spread of bird flu, in many cases, healthy, floor-reared turkeys and broiler chickens were herded into enclosed areas where they were administered propylene glycol foam to suffocate them.

In other cases, birds were killed by “ventilation shutdown”––the term used when barn temperatures are raised to at least 104°F for a minimum of three hours to kill the entire flock. As reported by Fortune, “round-the-clock incinerators and crews in hazmat suits” were commonly required for bird depopulation in 2015.

When farm animal disease pandemics hit in the U.S., Big Meat likes to control the mainstream media’s narrative by focusing the story on “the price of bacon,” trade wars or farmer profits. With the ASF virus, mainstream media is naively portraying it as a disease of other countries.

For example, The New York Times attributes China’s ASF to the country’s “emphasis on government-driven, top-down solutions to major problems, sometimes at the expense of the practical.” This analysis conveniently ignores the U.S.’s recent PEDv and bird flu epidemics.

The Times also indicts China’s “small farms, often packed together in crowded agricultural areas,” for the pandemic—again conveniently ignoring the U.S.’s own crowded factory farms, which are certainly at risk.

The real story of ASF is this: Factory farm animal prisons, with their pesticides, antibiotics and intense confinement, weaken the immune systems of animals, making them highly susceptible to pandemics. The model also causes egregious harm to workers, the environment and human consumers.

The African swine fever is just the latest example.

This post first appeared at The Organic Consumers Association here.

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Comments 13
  • Let them move !! Give them space & air ! So sick & disgusting!

  • This is the animal revenge… what a terrible place to keep these lovely animals… it’s wicked… justified retribution!! How dare we keep sentient animals in this metal hell …

  • Or–how about we end the gross injustice of breeding and killing billions of unique, sentient individuals who have the capacity for immense suffering and want to live as much as we do.

    It is unconscionable what we do to others for our selfish, unnecessary pleasures. We do not need to consume their bodies or their fluids and are healthier when we don’t. Throw in a well-adjusted moral compass and we have literally nothing to lose (except some weight and plenty of cholesterol points).

  • Spot on Wendy Jenks.
    We need to evolve and start caring for our fellow earthlings rather than thinking up ever more disgusting ways of maximising profit.
    Eating animals is not necessary or natural.

  • The animals in China were culled -it would be more truthful to say that live pigs were tipped into gigantic pits and then covered with earth -so that they suffocated and died.
    It was cheaper than shooting them first. 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭

  • Go vegan! Animals do not deserve to be created just to be killed and eaten. If we continue eating animals we will surely cause a global pandemic and many humans will die.

  • Animal holocaust must end!!! Let the animals live freely ! No one deserves this type of confinement or treatment much less an innocent animal! Humans are the only devils on earth!

  • Guess it really is time to go meatless

  • Go vegan!!

  • As usual‘farmers’ aka mass murderers only care about the money and not the immense suffering of the animals! The tables should be turned so these heartless bastards feel the pain of the animals who have fallen victim to animal agriculture

  • GO VEGAN.

    if we continue to treat sentient animals in this evil NAZI style for profit, we deserve all pandemic disasters coming our way. We do not deserve to share the earth with our fellow creatures. This is disgusting. Stop eating pigs, sheep, cattle or anything with a face.Plants help our health, they are our medicine, they are for our food, NOT ANIMALs who feel pain, sorrow distress exactly as do humans and that includes fish. Let us become better earth citizens. Today.

  • Humanity- the scourge of the Earth.
    The only species that kills everything.
    The only species that kills for “sport”.
    It makes me want to cry.
    ALL LIFE IS PRECIOUS.

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