COK Talks with Michael Greger, M.D.

Dr. Michael Greger is an internationally recognized lecturer who has presented at the Conference on World Affairs, the National Institutes of Health, and the Bird Flu Summit, among countless other symposia and institutions. He was also invited as an expert witness in defense of Oprah Winfrey at the infamous “meat defamation” trial. Dr. Greger is a graduate of the Cornell University School of Agriculture and the Tufts University School of Medicine and is the director of public health and animal agriculture at The Humane Society of the United States.

Q: Bird flu is a common avian virus in nature that typically poses no significant threat to humans. Why is H5N1 so alarming to experts worldwide?

A: The last human pandemic triggered by a bird flulike virus killed 50 million people around the world and became the worst plague in human history. The pandemic virus of 1918 killed less than 5% of its human victims; the current mutant strain of avian influenza spreading out of Asia—H5N1—has officially killed over 50%. Currently, with the unprecedented spread of this unprecedented virus, leading public health authorities understandably fear it could spark a global outbreak of disease that kills millions of people.

Q: In your new book, Bird Flu: A Virus of Our Own Hatching, you explain the role that factory farming plays in the mutation and spread of bird flu strains. Can you provide a brief overview?

A: Bird flu viruses have existed harmlessly for millions of years, harmless to both birds and people. Placed into extreme conditions, though, some of these viruses can mutate into a dangerous, so-called highly pathogenic forms. The trenches of WWI, for example, may have led to the pandemic of 1918. Millions of soldiers were crowded together in stressful, unhygienic conditions. From the point of view of bird flu viruses, these same trench warfare conditions exist today in every industrial chicken and egg operation—confined, crowded, stressed, but by the billions not just millions. Cramming tens of thousands of chickens into filthy football-field sized sheds to lie beak to beak in their own waste sets up a veritable breeding ground for disease.

Q: What is the U.S. government doing to address the health threats posed by factory farms?

A: The American Public Health Association has publicly called for a moratorium on building new animal factories in the United States to protect the health of local communities. With the emergence of viruses like H5N1, though, industrial animal agriculture has increasingly become a global public health menace. Unfortunately the level of undue agribusiness influence on public policy has made substantive changes difficult on a national level. Sadly, it may take a pandemic before society wakes up to the true cost of cheap chicken.

Q: What is the best step each of us can take to combat bird flu?

A: We need to heed the advice of the United Nations and to fight the role of what they call “factory farming” in the emergence and spread of dangerous bird flu viruses. It is not worth risking the lives of millions of people for the sake of inexpensive eggs and meat.

Q: Is there anything else you’d like to add?

A: The entire book is available for free, full-text online at BirdFluBook.org.

Bird Flu: A Virus of our Own Hatching

By Dr. Michael Greger
2006, Lantern Books

Visit BirdFluBook.org to order a copy or read the full-text online.

Excerpts from book:

The first ingredient in the recipe to potentially increase the virulence of bird flu is overcrowding. In modern broiler production, 20,000 to 30,000 day-old chicks are placed on the floor atop coarse wood shavings or other litter material in an otherwise barren shed. As they grow bigger, rapidly reaching slaughter-weight, the crowding grows more and more intensive.

In the United States, the average numbers of animals on chicken, pig, and cattle operations approximately doubled between 1978 and 1992.This increasing population density seems to be playing a key role in triggering emerging epidemics. In terms of disease control, according to the FAO, “[t]he critical issue is the keeping [of] more and more animals in smaller and smaller spaces....” The unnaturally high concentration of animals confined indoors in a limited airspace producing enormous quantities of manure provides, from a microbiologist’s perspective, “ideal conditions for infectious diseases.”

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