The Guardian runs a One Health propaganda narrative today. WHY would you want to "phase out intensive farming" when famines are being pedicted?

I have reproduced the second half of an article in today's Guardian, which is clearly a propaganda piece of the type I warned about yesterday, blaming humans for pandemics and suggesting that the way forward is with One Health, more financing for public health, more focus on climate change, and reducing intensive agriculture and logging.  Duh.

 

Monkeypox isn’t the disease we should be worried about

Climate change is likely to exacerbate the rapid spread of viruses and pathogens as humans encroach on the natural world

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/may/25/monkeypox-disease-climate-change

... It is now payback time for nature. The more human numbers have grown and we have encroached on wild spaces or imposed unnatural conditions on other species, the more we have created the ideal environments for viruses and pathogens to spill across species, mutate and spread. HIV, Ebola, Lassa fever and monkey pox in Africa; Sars and Covid-19 in China; Chagas, Machupo and Hantavirus in Latin America; Hendra in Australia; Mers in Saudi Arabia – all have all emerged in the past 75 years just as we have accelerated deforestation, moved to cities, come closer to animals and created a global

Most worrying for humans is not monkeypox, plague or even Ebola, which sound dangerous and exotic but are actually more or less controllable now with vaccines. Instead, the threat of a new bird flu, just as likely to come out of a farm in New York or England as one in China or Bolivia, now stalks humanity. Chicken is now the rich world’s most popular meat and tens of millions of near-genetically identical birds prone to catastrophic disease are being mass-reared at any one time, often in unhygienic conditions, and are able to mix with wild birds. It is only a matter of decades before a new highly pathogenic avian influenza strain evolves to be easily transmissible between humans.

As much by luck as good judgment, humans dodged a bullet with Sars in 2003 and to some extent with Covid, which so far has killed about 1% of people infected. But major flu pandemics with very high mortality rates come along every 30 years or so and we are well overdue the next. If we are lucky we will find a vaccine fast and it will only kill 10-20% of people it infects. If we are unlucky, it could be just as transmissible as Omicron and as fatal as Ebola – in which case it would effectively be game over for much of humanity and the global economy.

But we may have seen nothing yet. Climate change is now kicking in, creating a hotter, sicker world with a potentially catastrophic impact on disease. Global heating fundamentally changes the landscape of disease by forcing or enabling species to survive in new places and mix with others. Insects already kill about 700,000 people a year, but global heating allows mosquitoes, mites, fleas, ticks and other vectors to flourish in new areas, spreading dengue, chikungunya, and other diseases to higher ground or to previously cooler climates.

Canadian bacteriologists have shown how in times of great historical environmental change – like now – pathogens jump more easily to new, susceptible hosts. All they need is the opportunity for contact, and warming does just that. Once they have expanded to new hosts, novel variants are more likely to emerge, each with new infection capacities.

The situation looks bleak, but it is well within human ability to repair and turn this round. Science and new technologies are catching up with vaccines for rare and neglected diseases, and global surveillance and the early detection of potential virus spillovers in the wild can be greatly enhanced. But above all, global finance can be directed to improve creaking public health systems, especially in developing countries. They are the first line of defence and the surest precaution of disease containment.

The big lesson of Covid – and now of monkeypox – is that much infectious disease has its roots in ecological change. That means the health of the planet and the health of humans and must be considered alongside that of animals. It also means we should prepare now for the unexpected, invest in public health as never before, stop cutting down the forests, address climate change and phase out intensive farming. A “one health”, planetary approach to health is the best – and possibly the only – hope we have.

John Vidal is a former Guardian environment editor