Take Livestock Disease Seriously

By ART CULLEN

An outbreak of highly pathogenic avian flu in turkey flocks along the border of North Carolina and South Carolina, amid a pandemic of coronavirus killing thousands of humans, should put an exclamation point of urgency on our lackadaisical record of funding animal disease research and prevention. The deadly avian flu of 2015 should be fresh enough in our memory to acknowledge that catastrophes can occur unless we muster the commitment to overcome them. Obviously, we have not.

Today, Dr. James Roth of Iowa State University — one of the world’s leading experts in animal disease — warns us that pandemics more fearsome than COVID-19 await us unless we put our shoulder to the plow and plant a vigorous defense strategy against infectious disease in a world that is steadily warming and growing more crowded with people and animals.

Our food supply needs to increase 70% by 2050 to sate a growing human appetite for protein. Living on strictly a plant-based diet won’t cut it, especially for the growing number of malnourished people around the globe. China is committed as its second priority, the first being to preserve order, to meat production to feed a ballooning population. Here, hog and poultry populations are so highly concentrated that they are spreading to eastern South Dakota on land that is not so amenable to incorporating hog waste, which raises another host of environmental and health concerns.

Our question to Dr. Roth was:

Can we sustain this density model of livestock confinement going forward?

His answer:

Assuming a growing human population, we can and we must.

Confinement can offer better biosecurity, efficiency in production and, yes, animal health. The question becomes management and technology. We’re not good enough, as the 2015 outbreak and the current flu in the Carolinas illustrates. Dr. Roth worries about a host of pandemics that could arise familiar and novel, from ebola in swine to hoof-and-mouth disease. Do a Google search for avian flu and you will find dozens of reports within the last month of local or regional avian epidemics, some of which threaten human health (not the strain expressed in the Carolinas, which mutated from a low-pathogen strain). The implications for public health are obvious, and the potential for economic disaster is enormous.

We have been raising the question at least the last five years. Most funding for livestock research was frozen by that idiotic auto-pilot of austerity imposed by budget sequestration. When we ask a US senator or the House Agriculture Committee about it, as we have, we get the response of someone suffering from mad cow disease, sort of a dissipated muttering. Scientists asked Congress in the last Farm Bill for $250 million to strengthen our animal disease response system, including testing and diagnosis. They got $30 million. Dr. Michael Osterholm, a graduate of Luther College in Decorah, Iowa, who went on to become a world leader in epidemiology, has been warning for 15 years about our lack of research and preparedness, and about the woeful state of our public health infrastructure.

The coronavirus that is killing thousands of people may have started from a livestock market in China. Disease jumps from a bat to a hog to a human at dazzling speed and spreads just as fast. We are now re-establishing scientific research programs in China that were dismantled by the Trump administration, which has pushed to trim funding in animal and human disease research.

Of course, the Iowa livestock industry — and that is Storm Lake, Iowa — depends vitally on a safe and secure food processing protocol. That includes greatly expanding basic and applied research from Iowa State to the University of California at Davis. It means finding and building stockpiles of vaccines to protect humans and animals alike. It means preparing for future economic and food-supply shocks as disease pandemics shut down critical functions (like meatpacking, on which our entire regional economy depends).

Congress is in the midst of relief packages to stop the spread of novel viruses and keep our economy moving. It should start by giving the scientists what they asked for in rebuilding state-based livestock preparedness, and by increasing the amount of research funding by multiples of 10. (Last we saw, we were funding poultry research at $50 million per year. The avian flu of 2015 cost Iowa alone more than $1 billion). It is time to pull our heads out of the sand and realize that government has a function — to protect human health and safety — and that comes at a cost. Our period of illusions and dismantling of the social safety net is over.

From The Progressive Populist, May 15, 2020

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