Wed Feb 19, 2025
February 19, 2025

Factory farms enable the spread of bird flu

By OSCAR ECHEVERIA

A new uptick in H5N1 avian flu cases is raising alarms, as dairy farms around the country have reported infections among cattle in at least 860 herds across 16 U.S. states, marking the first major outbreak among cattle; which served as a new mammalian vector  for the virus to evolve in and infect humans. According to the CDC, 66 people have confirmed cases of H5N1 in the United States, and the infections have already shown the severity of the virus. The USDA had spent $1.7 billion since 2022 trying to contain bird flu on poultry farms. This spending is mainly split between disease prevention on farms and reimbursement for large die-offs at factory farms; for example, a single Iowa facility killed 4.2 million hens due to bird flu. The bird flu will cost billions of more dollars in expenses and losses if we do not make drastic systemic changes.

Notably, the profitability of the U.S. poultry industry relies on economic practices that favor scale and efficiency over health, safety, and morality. Concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) are spaces where birds are raised and fed in the confinement of small enclosures to maximize efficiency. The low quality of life and high stress environment promotes immunodeficiency in the birds, creating ideal conditions for disease spread.

The analysis of authors Rob Wallace and Mike Davis demonstrate capitalism’s exploitation of nature and point out that its drive to maximize investments has created the conditions for modern pandemics.Economic practices like deforestation and factory farming have pushed wildlife into close proximity with humans and livestock, allowing an opening for a myriad of new zoonotic diseases to be passed onto humans, burning through large swaths of human populations in waves.

Additionally, federal resistance to the prevalence of zoonotic type of illness has become increasingly lethargic, with a lack of timely response from regulators of domestic food production, as well a practice by the USDA of cutting private deals with the farm ownership in order to encourage reporting and communicating animal sickness to the USDA. 

Avian flu poses a significant threat to human populations for a number of reasons. Most are relevant to this situation because of their ability to turn industrial factory farms into viral factories. The most adaptable are likely to produce strains that quickly make their way through the agricultural system and into humans. These strains are often the most pathogenic strains, defined by their high mutation and reassortment rates; this allows for a high degree of adaptability to novel or unfavorable environments.

An influenza strain adapted from bird to cow—two organisms that are a few hundred million years divergent—is a strain that was likely more adaptable, which would subsequently be a boon to forming new strains that obfuscate immune memory in the future, paralleling subsequent SARS Covid variants.

There has not been any documentation of H5N1 human to human transmission thus far. In fact, the last avian flu pandemic was the Spanish flu of 1918, and researchers estimate that the Spanish flu (H1N1) R0 ( pronounced R naught) was 2-3. In comparison WHO initially estimated the R0 of Covid-19 to be 1.4 and 2.4. For those who don’t know, R0 is used to denote the amount of individuals a person is expected to transmit to on average and is a valuable tool in determining vaccination percentages necessary to achieve herd immunity. Although the context of the Spanish Flu and the time in medical knowledge certainly favored the virus in terms of average expected subsequent transmission, it did at the time seem to spread a bit better than Covid-19. 

What does this mean to the upcoming period of quacks entering already lackluster federal agencies? They would be quacks like RFK Jr., who is anti-vaccination, proposing to orient government resources away from epidemiology and infectious disease, and reorienting towards tackling chronic illness. Although the response to Covid-19 under Trump’s first term was entirely inadequate, imagine a Covid-19 with no safeguards and no response by the government. Would RFK buckle under the political pressure caused by a runaway virus? What would that even look like from a man that doesn’t believe the evidence?

A fear that many scientists hold to this day is ham-fisted responses to these type of zoonotic illness that would look similar to the war on mosquitoes with DDT of the 1930s to the ’60s. Likewise, a war on birds similar to China’s “four pests” campaign’s war on the sparrow could yield catastrophic results. [The killing of over one billion sparrows in 1958-60 led to the proliferation of locusts and other crop-eating insects, which resulted in famine in some parts of China.]

Humans fundamentally depend upon nature to survive. The practices of animal production under capitalism and destruction of the natural world is the driver of these illnesses that now seem to be constantly on the verge of rocking the foundations of the world. The connection between humans and nature through economic activity is a metabolism that has grown out of control under the capitalist pressure for expansion of profit. This is largely because there is a rift that has solidified under capitalism between the connection of humans and nature, called the metabolic rift.

Capitalists who own these industries alienate workers from what is produced and how it is produced. We need workers who have a connection to the industry and land, not the capitalists to inform the economic planning, to undo and reconcile these destructive food-production practices.

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