There was the catastrophe of 1918.
Over one and a half million americans crossed the atlantic for war
and they brought something with them.
One soldier got the Spanish flu...
... turned people blue and black and killed them.
Almost certainly it was a bird flu originally.
Despite this... production shifted from small family flock s to larger...
Farmers found more efficient ways to meet growing demand.
For just a few weeks more, the chicken of tomorrow...
...the short life span of a chicken... make mine chicken
Now ain't that looking good?
They never had dreamed that influenza could ever do anything like this to people before.
A system of millions and millions of chickens being grown in this very small confined area...
This is not the first outbreak of bird flu in the US and it won't be the last.
Human bird flu infection is rising.
The last time bird flu was detected here, thousands of birds had to be destroyed.
The spread of a deadly new virus grows.
...and rapidly spreading the respiratory virus.
The spread of the corona virus. A public health emergency of international concern.
You're not allowed to enter any public space...
Millions of people are in quarantine.
Patients continue to die... As if health officials in China don't have enough on their hands
with a spreading coronavirus, now officials announced
an outbreak of bird flu.
Mutations in the viral genome that lead to the formation of new strains.
Scientists and public health officials
are extremely concerned. Millions of birds will have to be killed and the virus is spreading.
But when we overcrowd animals, it's just a breeding ground for disease.
The overcrowding, the stress crippling their immune systems...
...to recognize that how we treat animals can have
global public health implications.
Experts like to say it's not if but when. Covid 19 is just a dress rehearsal.
In the midst of our current pandemic, we keep hearing comparisons between what is happening now
and what happened in the 1918 influenza pandemic
that infected one third of the world's population and killed around 50 million people
and is regarded as one of the most severe pandemics in recorded human history
The 1918 flu was caused by an influenza virus subtype, H1N1.
A bird flu, the origin of which is strongly thought to be a poultry farm in Kansas
where it spread throughout most cities in the US
and reached Europe by the hundreds of thousands of American soldiers
who cross the Atlantic during the First World War.
In fact, all three of the pandemics that took place in the 20th century
were all caused by different strains of avian influenza.
In more recent years, experts have feared the risk to global public health
from the strains H5N1 and H7N9.
Outbreaks of both strains started because of poultry farming and the sale of poultry at live bird markets.
And most worryingly, the H7N9 strain has an infection fatality rate of 30%
and the H5N1 strain has an infection fatality rate of 60%.
To put that into perspective, the 1918 influenza had a fatality rate of somewhere around 2.5%
and the current coronavirus, Covid 19, is thought to have a fatality rate of around 0.5%.
Imagine if right now, instead of being affected by a virus with a 0.5% fatality rate,
we were facing a virus with a fatality rate of 30%
or even 60%.
Thankfully both the H5N1 and H7N9 strains
both have poor human to human transmission capability.
However, the H7N9 strain
is rated by the influenza risk assessment tool as having the greatest potential to cause a pandemic
as well as potentially posing the greatest risk to severely impact public health
if it were to achieve sustained human to human transmission.
This is because influenza strains can mutate at any point,
and so at any point, a highly dangerous strain of avian influenza
could mutate to also become highly pathogenic.
This is why bird flu is one of the gravest threats facing humanity at any given time.
In fact, the United Nations states that the two biggest threats to human existence
are climate change and pandemics.
And of all the diseases, avian influenza is considered the most concerning
when it comes to its pandemic potential.
Normally, for a virus to have pandemic potential, the fatality rate would have to be relatively low
so as to ensure that the virus can spread without killing its host before it's able to do so.
However, with modern farming practices involving tens of thousands of birds
confined in densely packed barns on farms that
hold hundreds of thousands of birds,
the virus can spread quickly, and with live animal markets taking place in cities with millions of people,
in a world of high volumes of air travel, a strain of avian influenza
wouldn't even necessarily need to ratchet down its fatality rate
to become a pandemic risk.
Think of how much our society has been affected in this current pandemic.
Everything has stopped. Billions of people have been placed in forced quarantine or self-isolation.
We even became fearful of potential food shortages
and the economy has collapsed. All with a virus that has a 0.5% fatality rate.
Now let's say we have a virus that spreads like the common cold but kills half of everyone it infects
and the risk of death is the same if you are 80 or 20.
The world as we know it would cease to exist.
Society would collapse. There would be no Netflix. No internet. No Amazon deliveries.
No groceries. Utilities would be severely affected,
meaning people would lose access to water and electricity.
With the way our world currently operates, when we talk about pandemics
the conversation is never if there is a next one.
It's always when there is a next one.
Now we might be lucky.
Maybe the next pandemic will be more in line with the 2009 swine flu pandemic.
Or maybe it will be a novel strain of avian influenza
with fatality rate 20, 30, 40, 50, 100 times treater
than we are currently dealing with.
In a recent UN report, rising demand for animal protein
as well as animal farming were cited as being main risk factors in the creation and spread of viruses.
And Thomas Gillespie, a disease ecologist at Emory University,
recently stated that the primary risks for future spillover of zoonotic diseases
are deforestation of tropical environments
and large-scale industrial farming of animals,
specifically pigs and chickens at high density.
And both of these activities are increasing rapidly.
In fact, pathogens are jumping from animals to people
faster than scientists can develop vaccines and treatments.
We're truly at a tipping point.
We must realign our financial and agricultural systems to truly acknowledge the critical importance
of the environment on our health, where the future is going to look far worse
By far the biggest risk factor in the creation of avian flu
is poultry farming, poultry slaughter, and life bird markets.
Avian influenza is such a huge risk because we farm and slaughter tens of billions of birds
every single year for food.
And as long as we continue to do so, we will suffer from outbreaks and pandemics of avian flu.
And the risk doesn't just come from farms in Asia.
There are outbreaks of bird flu happening all over the world all of the time.
There are for example hundreds of wet markets across the US,
with 80 alone in New York City. And bird flu strains have been found within these markets.
It is a constant issue that is happening everywhere.
And just as the 1918 pandemic is strongly thought to have originated from a poultry farm in Kansas,
the next pandemic could start in a farm in England or in Australia or in France or in the US.
It could start anywhere and when it does, the only thing we will be able to do
is hope that the infection fatality rate is not high enough
to end the world as we know it.