Thursday, August 13, 2009

Goats kill

There is currently an epidemic raging, growing and spreading that is making more and more people very sick.
So sick that people are even dying.
The epidemic is called Q-Fever and a major outbreak is now happening in a province of the Netherlands called Noord-Brabant.


Q fever is a zoonotic disease caused by Coxiella burnetii, a species of bacteria that is distributed globally.
It is a bacteria that comes from the excrement of goats and sheep.
The wind may blow over goat's pooh and carry the bacteria that can survive by itself for months.
If a human being breaths air that contains this bacteria, likely that person will get the Q-fever.
Getting headaches, feel without any energy, becoming totally miserable.
Like a 23 year old victim said: I feel like a 70 year old man.
In most cases, a treatment with antibiotics during three weeks will eventually heal the Q-Fever person.
But in many cases patients develop pneumonia.
Or the liver is attacked.
And most particularly, the heart valves may get infected needing replacement.

In this province of Noord-Brabant in the Netherlands about 2.5 million people are living.
And they happen to have industrial breeding of animals in their province.
In large halls they keep pigs, veal, chicken and goats.
Animals that never see the light of day, have no space to move and have to stand on metal grills.
How excessive and perplexing this industrial breeding has become is explained by the figures.
In an area where 2.5 million people live, they are keeping 5 million pigs.
Then there are 30 million chicken kept in halls in that part of the Netherlands.
And over 100.000 goats.

Large ventilators blow the air out of the halls where these animals are housed.
Introducing bacteria's in the environment of the human beings.
Who breath them.
And then there are millions of tons of feces coming from the animals that end up in the environment.

It is totally unnatural and irresponsible to keep so many animals together under those extreme conditions in a highly populated area.
Hence, it is only logic that diseases break out like Q-Fever.
And we may expect new and worse epidemics in the future.

So, the solution is simple.
Close down these places of hell for animals that make victims among humans.
But at that very moment, money comes into the picture.
Well being of animals and humans gets then positioned opposed to the material and economic interests of the bio industry.

For now this epidemic in the Netherlands is alarming.
Making victims.
Over 1,500 people are officially infected and this number is rising rapidly.
Three persons have died of the Q-Fever until now.
But still no initiative has been taking by the authorities to start limiting the presence in those huge numbers of animals in their province.
For that to happen, first more people must get sick and die.
Because, in the end, it is about how much money is a life of a human being worth.
For three dead people the authorities are not going to force bio-industrialists to close down their centers of animal cruelty.
The question is when drastic action will be taken: after 30 deaths? 300? 3.000?

The public would be fools for this to happen.
They must come to realize that the bio-industry is the result of their own way of how they want to spend their money.
Consumers want to buy in the supermarket a steak or a chicken for as little money as possible.
Forcing themselves not to think about the consequences of paying so little for meat.
Forgetting how those animals are treated and what food and chemical substances they are given to eat.
Ignoring how nature responds when you put 5 million pigs among 2.5 million people.

So, either the public starts boycotting meat that comes from the bio-industry.
To bring that horrible business to a halt.
Or they continue to buy and eat cheap meat and more and more people will die.






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1 comment:

Ken Norton - Image 66 Media said...

I think it has a lot to do with the enforced standards of each country. I'm not opposed, for instance to industrial hog operations here in Iowa. I've been in several of these facilities and marvel at the life-quality that the hogs are subject to. As far as disease control, these facilities practice an aggressive bio-security.

The feces and urine is contained, processed and used as fertilizer. There is no runoff into surface or ground water (other than the applied fertilizer which happens anyway).

A small open-air hog operation is actually far more polluting that the big factory operations. An unconfined outdoor hog contributes to degradation of not only surface water, but of the land it is standing on. Open-air hogs (and chickens) are subject to many health issues and contribute to the spread of diseases far more than high-density indoor operations.

The industry here in Iowa is quite specific and well-regulated when it comes to this. I live about ten miles from an egg operation that has tens of millions of chickens in a series of buildings spread out over hundreds of acres. From a bio-security perspective, you can't get within about 500m of the nearest building. Because of the density and population of chickens, they take animal health extremely seriously as an outbreak in just one massive facility could be a billion dollar problem and take ten years to recover from. When you are talking 20-50 million chickens or 20,000 hogs at one location, it takes a long time to rebuild the breeding operation.

I believe there are two issues:
1. Eating Meat from a health and ethical perspective,
2. Poor farming practices.

The two are separate.