Newly released drone footage shows the steps the animal agriculture industry has taken to prevent the spread of bird flu – killing hundreds and thousands of chickens to contain the disease.
An expert recently claimed that a bird flu pandemic could spell a worse disaster for humanity than COVID-19, Knewz.com has learned.
The drone footage was shared by the international nonprofit animal protection organization Mercy for Animals and showed dump trucks disposing of massive quantities of dead fowl.
The bodies of dead chickens can be seen piling up at the disposal site, with clouds of white feathers blowing away in the wind, while workers bury them in rows of trenches.
The organization shared the footage on YouTube, where it described it as “a never-before-seen glimpse into the animal agriculture industry’s devastating response to the disease.”
“This is a predictable consequence of the factory-farming system. Keeping thousands of animals crammed inside buildings for their entire lives is a recipe for spreading dangerous diseases.”
Mercy for Animals wrote in a blog post about the drone footage that the factory farm shown in the video reportedly housed approximately 4.2 million chickens. However, every single one of the birds was killed out of concern regarding the spread of H5N1 avian influenza.
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The nonprofit also noted that the process used by farmers to kill off entire flocks of livestock at once, known as depopulation, is “extremely cruel, despite being legal and paid for by taxpayer dollars.”
“They use cheap methods… the USDA recommends methods such as ventilation shutdown—closing off a facility’s ventilation system until the animals inside die from heatstroke. Other methods include drowning birds with firefighting foam and piping carbon dioxide into sealed barns to cut off their oxygen supply.”
In a call-for-action post, Mercy for Animals further iterated that factory farms are “hot spots” for the spread of diseases.
The organization called on Congress to pass the Industrial Agriculture Accountability Act, or the IAA, which, if passed, would require “corporations to take responsibility for the pandemic risks they cause.”
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“The U.S. food system needs reform. The Industrial Agriculture Accountability Act (IAA)… is necessary to prevent the cruel depopulation of countless farmed animals and to protect human health. Call on your members of Congress to pass the IAA.”
Dr. Leonard A. Mermel, the professor of medicine at Warren Alpert Medical School and the medical director of the Department of Epidemiology & Infection Prevention at Lifespan Healthcare System, has recently pointed out the very real possibility of an H5N1 bird flu pandemic in an article in The Providence Journal.
He expressed concerns that the disease could infiltrate humans through cows and subsequently make mankind the carrier of the virus.
He wrote in the article that cow udders contain cells that have receptors used by the virus to attach themselves to the airways of birds, which they can use to attach to human airways as well.
“Since there can be millions of H5N1 viruses in a cow udder with receptors for human airways and since H5N1 is a virus that quickly mutates, the cow udder is a potential ‘mixing vessel’ whereby a mutation could lead to the H5N1 virus to preferentially bind to human cells,” Dr. Mermel elaborated.
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The expert claimed that the United States federal government does not have the authority to conduct tests to detect bird flu in farm animals.
Furthermore, the government is also not authorized to “require H5N1 testing of people exposed to infected cows, or to prevent raw, unpasteurized milk to be removed from human consumption until infection among cows has been controlled,” he wrote.
Dr. Mermel’s concerns regarding a potential bird flu pandemic are shared by the World Health Organization (WHO), which wrote in a May 2024 FAQ that the virus is constantly evolving and “could potentially become easily transmissible from person to person.”
It is worth noting that, earlier in June, WHO wrote about the first confirmed case of a new fatal strain of avian influenza known as the H5N2, which claimed a middle-aged man’s life in Mexico.
The post Shocking, Never-Before-Seen Drone Footage Reveals the Devastating Impact of Bird Flu appeared first on Knewz.
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Author: Samyarup Chowdhury
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