Diseases linked to proximity to animals, not just eating them

Many of our infectious diseases are the result of living in proximity to animals. For example tetanus. The propoganda is that it is caused by organisms that live in the soil. This is true, but it is not the whole truth. How did those organisms get into the soil? From using animal feces to feed food plants grown in that soil. Anthrax is well-known to have crossed over from sheep. People used to have their sheep in a nearby place, and visit with their sheep every day. At one time people, in some cultures, people even slept with their sheep in the same room.

Smallpox is believed to have crossed over from some rodent i think it was. There are a number of other examples but they are escaping me at the moment. measles. Chicken pox.

Aren't swine flu and bird flu from large populations of captive animals kept close together in unhealthy conditions?

ie. it's our treatment of animals that has caused swine flu and bird flu because the factory farms are ideal breeding grounds for deseases. I believe swine flu was 'an accident waiting to happen'. Either that or GSK released it deliberatly so they could sell vaccines!

It annoys me how people don't seem to learn from the outbreaks of desease. Instead they just develop more drugs. Forever treating the symptoms and never the root cause of the problem.

^ Yes, I agree with you there on that. They don't learn anything at all. Then they'll wonder why this new strain of bug is resistant to even the most powerful antibiotic etc on the market. Well, duh, if you didn't pump the poor animals full of antibiotics and kept them so confined in squalid conditions, you wouldn't have this problem. :rolleyes:

Diseases such as anthrax crossed over from animals to humans 100's or thousands of years before factory farming. Then they decimated human populations, leaving only those humans who were somehow genetically predisposed or otherwise predisposed to have greater resistance to being killed by the diseases. However when populations of humans and animals bring themselves to a new geographical area, the diseases blossom again, becuase the new population has not already been selected for resistance. This is what happend when Europeans colonized the "new world."

The root cause of the problem is not factory farming. It is domesticating animals. Period. Any animal.

Humans can also pass diseases onto non-human animals, I think it's referred to as 'reverse zoonosis'.

Quote:

---

sandra

Humans can also pass diseases onto non-human animals...

---

Yup.