The next pandemic is closer than you think
A mysterious illness
During my first semester at St. Louis University, tragedy struck my family. It began with a severe cold featuring painful coughing fits that lasted, unabated, for an entire week. By the end of that week, my mom could no longer use her right arm to fill prescriptions at Walgreens, where she worked as a staff pharmacist of 23 years. Shortly thereafter, she began suffering from excruciating back pain that had no explanation; she had never suffered from back pain, and doctors could not locate the cause of the pain. In the span of just over a week, my mom went from a full-time pharmacist to someone crippled by unexplained pain, leaving her bed-bound and unable to sleep, no matter how exhausted her ailing body grew.
As the pain continued to grow with no relief in sight, she trekked to the hospital in the hope they could pinpoint the mysterious source of her sudden, acute back pain. Finding nothing wrong with her, the doctors sent her home, chalking up her condition to a pulled muscle. She crawled back to bed in exquisite pain, and there she remained for a couple more days until, driven mad by ceaseless pain, she trekked to the hospital once more, hoping for any modicum of relief they could provide. After another examination, the doctors once more found nothing wrong with her, suggesting, once more, her only ailment was a pulled muscle. This time, my mom refused to leave the hospital; it was this firm insistence on discovering the baffling source of her pain that saved her life.
As doctors later informed my dad, my mom came within 24 hours of dying from an aggressive case of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, more commonly known as MRSA. MRSA is a problematic pathogen that has grown resistant to several common antibiotics, making it difficult to treat. It can be spread by hand-to-hand contact, and it most commonly causes skin infections. However, it can also cause pneumonia; it was this latter ailment that caused my mom’s torment. As fluid built up in her lungs and pleura due to her erumpent case of pneumonia, it exerted pressure against several of her nerves, hampering her arm mobility and explaining her agonizing back pain. While the exact source of her exposure still remains a mystery, little did we realize that her condition could be connected to a seemingly obscure source: factory farms.
An unlikely source
On modern factory farms, farmers crowd animals by the tens of thousands in vast, windowless sheds. The crowded, filthy conditions that emerge as a result of this mass confinement provide the perfect breeding ground for disease. Worse yet, these animals consume large doses of antibiotics intended to promote growth and maximize profits. As Moncia Nickelsburg observes in her article, “5 modern diseases grown by factory farming,” intensive animal farming “creates perfect conditions for the proliferation of super bugs: The stress and unsanitary conditions of CAFOs weaken animals' immune systems, making them more susceptible to infection; overcrowding allows disease to spread quickly and easily; and over time, antibiotics can cause resistant strains of bacteria to evolve.”
Cows, chickens, pigs, turkeys, and other animals raised for slaughter not only endure horrific cruelties, such as ear clipping, tail docking, and debeaking, inherent to the industry, they also receive massive doses of antibiotics in their feed and water; in fact, up to 80% of medically important antibiotics are wasted on animal agriculture. Lack of diverse gene pools further compound the issue of disease spread. Over time, these conditions lead to ever more antibiotic-resistant bacterial strains, which can spread with devastating consequences to human animals. To imagine how such vast quantities of antibiotics are used in factory farms and lead to antimicrobial resistance, consider the following story that centers on just one pig:
Soon after he is born, a suckling pig on a factory farm receives his first antibiotic—oxytetracycline—as a preventive against infective enteritis. Within the next few hours, the pig undergoes processing, which involves having his ears notched and testes removed without sedation or painkillers. Twenty days later, he is weaned from his mother and removed from her to a transition crate, where he receives more antibiotic drugs in his formulated, pretreated feed. The piglet’s immature, stressed immune system makes him susceptible to bouts of diarrhea, the first in a long series of illnesses to which he is vulnerable on a high-density factory farm.
After another dose of antibiotics to treat the post-weaning diarrhea, he is moved to a nursery, where he is one among many housed in crowded, unsanitary conditions. He remains there for two to three months and is fed antibiotic-rich feed and water, which are meant to protect him and the herd from a host of infectious diseases such as meningitis, greasy pig disease, and more diarrhea. Continually receiving medicated feed enables the piglet, within six months of birth, to attain his target weight, at which point he is considered “slaughterhouse-ready.”
As we would later discover, my mom’s MRSA infection had a direct connection to pigs bred in such deplorable, antibiotic-laden environments. European studies, for example, have found a “strong causal link” between MRSA and factory pig farms. The bacterium is also found widely across Canadian pig farms, and likely resides in many US pig farms as well. Nearly half of Dutch pig farmers are MRSA carriers, and a study found that 39% of pigs killed in Dutch slaughterhouses carry the often deadly pathogen. While we will never be certain about precisely how my mom acquired MRSA, the connection between factory pig farming and the prevalence, mutation, and spread of the bacterium is clear.
The COVID-19 connection
Antibiotic overuse in livestock certainly contributes to the rise of antibiotic-resistant superbugs, but what is the relevance of factory farming to diseases caused by viruses? In particular, what might animal exploitation, more generally, have to do with the rise of COVID-19?
To answer these questions, we can zoom back to the last major pandemic to strike the US: the 2009 H1N1 swine flu. The H1N1 virus was first discovered in factory farms in North Carolina in the 1990’s, but it would not reach pandemic proportions until a mutated version of the North Carolina virus appeared in a Mexican factory farm. From there, it spread rapidly across the globe, claiming an estimated 151,700-575,400 human lives. Unlike other flus that disproportionately affect the elderly, 80% of the human animals claimed by the 2009 swine flu pandemic were under age 65. But there is another sinister connection to our prior discussion of antibiotic-resistant bacteria; up to 55% of those who died as a result of being affected with the H1N1 flu had secondary bacterial infections, many of which were antibiotic-resistant thanks, in large part, to the overuse of antibiotics in factory farms.
There exists a similar, insidious connection between COVID-19 and secondary bacterial infections; roughly half of those who have died while infected with COVID-19 struggled with antibiotic-resistant secondary infections that could not be treated with the standard line of antibiotics. COVID-19 is also believed to have originated in a wet market in Wuhan, China, where a variety of “exotic” animals were consumed. Although COVID-19 is theorized to have originated in bats, the intermediary host that ultimately spread COVID-19 to human animals is still unknown. While “It is impossible to determine whether COVID-19 would have arisen without the existence of the wet markets or settings like it,” it is true that, similarly to factory farms, “such markets supply the conditions for such diseases to arise and infect humans,” according to USA TODAY. Severe acute respiratory syndrome, also known as the SARS virus, is also believed to have emerged at a wet market in the Guangdong province of southern China, passing from horseshoe bats to palm civets, then on to humans who consumed their contaminated flesh.
A troubling future
The world is rapidly hurtling toward a future where even our most powerful antibiotics are incapable of treating bacterial diseases, many of which were once benign, with the overuse and abuse of antibiotics in factory farms serving as a key culprit. The World Health Organization, Center for Disease Control, and hundreds of concerned scientists around the world are calling for the cessation of antibiotic use in healthy animals who do not require such treatment. Meanwhile, bacteria and viruses continue to multiply, mutate, and cross the species barrier in factory farms, wet markets, and other sites of animal exploitation. In fact, an outbreak of “highly pathogenic” bird flu occurred in a South Carolina poultry farm in early April while COVID-19 raged elsewhere around the world. While this outbreak was successfully contained, it could have easily escaped and potentially caused another pandemic with equally dire consequences.
As global demand for meat continues to soar, driven by the rise of the global middle class in China and parts of Africa and the Middle East, it is only a matter of time before the next pandemic strikes. We could even see a coronavirus redux if vaccines prove ineffective against a new, resistant strain of Sars-CoV-2 recently discovered in Danish mink farms. Regardless of which pandemic follows our current battle against COVID-19, it will almost certainly be the direct result of human exploitation of nonhuman animals—with potentially equally catastrophic results, both for loved ones and society at large.
