The spread of the coronavirus
The spread of a deadly new virus
How deadly is it, how fast can it spread, and how prepared are we
As experts fear it could become a pandemic
It can lead to organ failure, pneumonia and death. There's no treatment, so prevention is a top priority.
The recent outbreak of a novel coronavirus
now called COVID-19 has left many of us worried and paranoid about our own health,
as well as interacting with other people in carrying out everyday tasks
such as traveling on public transport. At the time of film in this video,
the number of people diagnosed with the virus worldwide is nearing a hundred thousand
and the number of people who have died is currently over two thousand, and is set to continue rising.
Fears are growing that it won't be possible to stop the global spread of coronavirus.
Health experts have warned that the chances of containing it are diminishing as cases appear in more countries.
This means that COVID-19 is overtaking the SARS and MERS viruses in regards to the number of people killed and also infected.
This video isn't about coronavirus.
This is about something much worse, something that you may have never even heard of.
Something the experts have predicted will kill 10 million people each year by 2050.
To put that into perspective the World Health Organization has stated that cancer killed an estimated 9.6 million people in 2018.
The risk is so urgent that a recent United Nations report claimed that common diseases are becoming
untreatable and the World Health Organization has described it as one of the biggest threats to global health.
The risk is antibiotic resistance - a problem that occurs when bacteria adapt, gradually causing antibiotics to become less and less effective
until we are left with diseases that we are unable to treat.
If we can't get this under control
by 2050
not long, the worldwide toll will be 10 million deaths a year.
Currently around 700,000 people around the world die due to antibiotic resistant diseases every single year,
with over 200,000 of those deaths coming from a drug-resistant tuberculosis,
yet even though the number of people being killed right now by antibiotic resistance
dwarves the number of people at risk from COVID-19, many of us have never heard about this problem.
The problem is becoming so severe that issues like urinary tract infections
and STDs are becoming resistant to treatment. There is even a super resistant strain of gonorrhea
which has developed resistance to nearly all of the antibiotics used for its treatments.
A world without usable antibiotics is a world where the diseases and infections that we currently regard as being trivial could become deadly.
Illnesses like pneumonia
could kill tens of millions of people, as could sepsis.
Organ transplants will be extremely dangerous, and cancer fighting
chemotherapy will be severely affected, as antibiotics are needed to fight off infection as chemotherapy
destroys our white blood cells. Even procedures like hip and knee replacements and dental work could become dangerous,
and even life-threatening. The so-called miracle of modern medicine
would cease to exist and our healthcare systems would regress to the state they were in in the early 20th century.
So why is this happening? Well firstly because doctors and medical professionals are handing out too many antibiotics,
leading to calls for them only to be given out when they absolutely have to be.
An even bigger and more widespread problem is related to the food that we eat.
According to the FDA in the US,
80 percent of all antibiotics sold are used on animal farms, and in Europe
animals consume more antibiotics than humans, meaning that the use of antibiotics in animal farming
is driving the rise of resistant bacteria.
Our conservation of animal products is creating one of the biggest threats to human health on our planet right now
due to the fact that we raise animals in such a horrific way that they require antibiotics to keep them alive
just long enough that we can then cut their throats or kill them in a gas chamber and then eat them.
On much of the planet, most meat animals get antibiotics every day of their lives not to cure illnesses
but to fatten them up and to protect them against the factory farm conditions they are raised in.
It is such an absurd system that is not only responsible for killing
trillions of animals every year, but is leading the way in creating a global health crisis that within the next few decades
could be killing more humans than cancer every year.
It is also worth mentioning that the new coronavirus (COVID-19)
is reported as starting in an animal market where wild animals and live animals are traded as well,
meaning that again, in the same way as outbreaks have been caused in the past,
our exploitation of non-human animals has created the new coronavirus outbreak.
Killing non-human animals is in turn killing us as well
and even if we create new antibiotics in the future
this cycle of bacteria becoming resistant will continue if we don't change. To make matters worse,
pharmaceutical companies are currently infecting animals with COVID-19 in the hope of finding a way to create a vaccination.
And so because of our desire to kill and eat animals, more animals now have to suffer.
How can it make sense? The most important medication that we have in the world is being squandered.
Keeping animals alive just long enough so that we can fatten them up,
slaughter them, and then eat them, in turn causing our leading diseases such as heart disease and certain forms of cancer.
Everybody suffers when we exploit others.
Is this an absurdity that we will recognize and prevent from getting worse,
or will we continue to turn a blind eye and then in the future look at our children
and tell them that we're sorry, but bacon just tasted too good.