Bird flu caused by man's inhumane treatment of animals

Tuesday, May 09, 2006 by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...) Tags: bird flu, sustainable agriculture, animal rights

When it comes to the bird flu virus, many people are asking, "Where did the virus come from?" The answer, as always, is unpopular with the popular press and the corporations that dominate the information you're allowed to see in this country. The bird flu virus, you see, wasn't created merely by chance, and it didn't just magically appear in migratory birds. In truth, the virus is the natural result of the mistreatment of animals as a food source. When you take tens of millions of chickens and pigs and coop them up in little tiny cages, and you don't give them sunlight, you don't give them a balanced healthy diet, and you don't let them run around in the wild or have fresh air, you create the perfect conditions for the generation and transmission of infectious disease.

This is what's happening not only in the United States and Europe, but also in Southeast Asia, where chickens, pigs and cattle are grown in horrifying conditions and subjected to treatments that are absolutely inhumane and tantamount to torture. In contrast, if you look at wild chickens running around Hawaii, and you don't see this. You don't see this dangerous H5N1 bird flu influenza in wild Hawaiian chickens because they are eating a varied diet made up of wild foods. Those chickens are getting fresh air, and they don't live two inches from each other, where diseases can be so easily transmitted.

In other words, when you take these animals and you pack them together so closely, you accelerate the evolution and development of dangerous influenza. It's almost like having an influenza lab where you're trying to create a biological weapon of some sort. That's how bad it is. You speed the mutation of these viruses by at least a factor of 100. It's almost the perfect laboratory for creating dangerous infectious disease. The existence of bird is a direct result of the way we treat animals in this world. It is a consequence of our inhumane food creation policies.

The bird flu virus is perhaps just nature's way of rebalancing the equation. When we, as human beings, treat animals so inhumanely, it will result in a virus that will eventually infect humans and kill some percentage of the human population. As long as we continue to abuse animals as a food source, we will continue to generate these infectious diseases that may, someday, actually wipe out a significant portion of the human population.

Nature has a funny was of rebalancing things over time. You know what happens when we get too crazy with the environment? Global warming causes hurricanes and earthquakes and world climate changes that eventually kill off a percentage of the human population (thanks to crop failures and food supply shortages, ultimately). As the weather gets more extreme and crops aren't reliable, people will starve. It's just cause-and-effect, and the effect that we are seeing now with the bird influenza virus has a cause.

Of course, because human beings are so egotistical, they think they control nature. They think they control animals, oceans and the weather, and they think they can also control the outbreak of influenza. They think they can control it with manmade drugs and vaccines. In fact, manmade products are all they're willing to talk about or promote, and that's what gets coverage in the mainstream press.

Our society has health authorities who imagine there's really nothing of value in nature. They think nothing from nature can be useful in this fight to save potentially millions of lives. They are provably wrong, and being wrong may come at a great cost. I will let history be the judge of these comments if we have a pandemic outbreak. It is the narrow-mindedness and egotistical nature of conventional medicine and our "drugs and surgery" approach to health that will be responsible for the deaths we may see. Our food industry shares that blame in the way it treats animals and in the way it removes nutrients from processed foods, leaving the population vulnerable to infection. We may be on the verge of learning some very big and very costly lessons on this planet, and it may be this bird flu virus that is the messenger. Even if it isn't this one, it may be the next.

Now, it's possible that this particular virus won't become a pandemic, and that would be the preferred situation here. I would much rather this not become a pandemic outbreak. I hope H5N1 influenza is kept under control. However, health authorities from the world of conventional medicine are now admitting that a pandemic is inevitable; this is their exact language. It's inevitable. It may not be this virus, but it will be some future virus, because until we change our ways and learn to live in harmony with the planet, we're going to continue to engage in causative actions that produce these infectious diseases.

It's our own destructive behavior coming back to haunt us. If we don't learn to live in harmony with nature, we will not survive.

"I've worked with flu all my life, and this is the worst influenza virus that I have ever seen. ...We have to realize that this influenza virus in poultry becomes systemic, goes to the brain and causes, essentially, respiratory Ebola. If that happens in humans, God help us." - Robert G Webster, a virologist and flu researcher at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn.

You'll find more quotes and statistics about the bird flu virus at BirdFluDefense.com. And if you want to read an eye-opening book that reveals the frightening future for our civilization if we don't stop destroying our soils, environment and food supply, read, "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed" by Jared Diamond.