By Wayne Pacelle on October 19, 2009
Recently, The New York Times ran a detailed front-page investigative story from reporter Michael Moss about pathogens in ground beef and the consequences for public health. The piece led with the tragic details of Stephanie Smith, a former dance instructor from Minnesota who ate a hamburger at age 20 and is now paralyzed. It is a chilling report that shatters the assumption that government is carefully monitoring the integrity of the food supply, especially in a global economy where a single hamburger may be pieced together from parts of different cows from throughout the world.
I asked The Humane Society of the United States’ director of Public Health and Animal Agriculture, Dr. Michael Greger, for his thoughts…
E. coli O157:H7, the strain that nearly took Stephanie Smith’s life, is a relatively new pathogen. First discovered in 1982, its emergence and spread has been blamed on three factors: the beef industry’s transition to factory farms, the routine mass feeding of antibiotics to cattle, and the stress associated with trucking these animals as many as a thousand miles to slaughter.
E. coli O157:H7 remains the leading cause of acute kidney failure in U.S. children. Tens of thousands of Americans are sickened every year from this bacteria. And dozens die. But shockingly, the devastation caused by this pathogen is far from the worst of what emerges from today’s factory farms and food processing system.
By comparison, millions of people contract “extraintestinal” E. coli infections—urinary tract infections (UTIs) that can invade the bloodstream and cause an estimated 36,000 deaths annually in the United States. That’s more than 500 times as many deaths as E. coli O157:H7. We know where E. coli O157:H7 comes from—fecal matter from the meat, dairy, and egg industries—but where do these other E. coli come from?
When medical researchers at the University of Minnesota took more than 1,000 food samples from multiple retail markets, they found evidence of fecal contamination in 69 percent of the pork and beef and 92 percent of the poultry samples. Half of the poultry samples were contaminated with the UTI-associated extraintestinal E. coli bacteria.
Scientists now suspect that by eating chicken, women infect their lower intestinal tract with these meat-borne bacteria, which can then creep up into their bladder. In addition to the traditional hygiene measures aimed at preventing urinary tract infections, now women can add avoiding poultry as a way to help fend off UTIs.
In chickens, these bacteria cause a disease called colibacillosis, now one of the most significant and widespread infectious diseases in the poultry industry due to the way we treat these animals. Studies have shown infection risk to be directly linked to overcrowding in chicken factory farms. In caged egg-laying hens, the most significant risk factor for flock infection is hen density per cage.
Researchers have calculated that affording just a single quart of additional living space (about equivalent to a 4-inch cube) to each hen would be associated with a corresponding 33 percent drop in the risk of colibacillosis outbreak. This is one of the reasons our efforts to improve the lives of farm animals are critical not only for animal welfare, but for the health of humans and animals alike.
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By Wayne Pacelle on July 13, 2009
It’s week two of Crazy Sexy Life’s Meatless Monday campaign and we hope you’ll join us again for the ride! In today’s blog, Wayne Pacelle, President and CEO of The Humane Society of the US sheds more light on the profound effect we can all have on the planet and the wellness of our fellow beings just by modifying our choices as a consumer.
At The HSUS, we are engaging in a range of cost-cutting management actions to cope with the downturn in the economy, but we are doing our best not to cut any essential animal protection programs. Especially in tough economic times, the determined actions of The HSUS and other animal protection groups are needed more than ever for animals in crisis.
Consumers are having to make tough cost-saving decisions, too. And as they strike some non-essential items from their shopping lists, they are shrinking demand for certain products that cause harm to animals. For example, the fur industry, which produces a luxury product, is experiencing waning sales. The Federal Trade Commission reported in 2005 that an estimated 3.5 million animal fur garments and accessories were for sale annually in the United States, and in 2009, that number has dropped to just more than 1 million—an astonishing decline of more than 70 percent. In fact, prices for seal pelts from Canada have declined by a record amount, though part of that steep decline is due to our closing markets for the pelts through policy changes in Europe and elsewhere.
Gourmet magazine is reporting that people are reducing to some degree their consumption of meat products. Given the inordinately high per capita consumption of animal products in America, this is good news for animals, the environment, and public health. The HSUS is a big tent organization, and we support people who want to switch to more humanely raised animal products, reduce the amount of meat in their diets, or try a vegetarian lifestyle—but the reduction of meat consumption is one of the best things we can do for the planet given how unsustainable the current levels of factory farming are.
Reductions in meat consumption means less support for factory farms—many of which confine animals in small cages or crates, and subject them to other procedures and handling practices that compromise their welfare. In fact, Smithfield Foods, which has pledged but not yet completed the shift toward eliminating gestation crates for sows, reported major financial losses during the last quarter, and it says it needs to shrink its pig population to account for decreasing demand. The dairy industry is also in the throes of reducing its size because of oversupply.
Gourmet notes “the USDA estimates that the production of meat from every major category of farm animal will drop for the first time since 1973.” This is also good news for the environment, since the massive numbers of animals on Confined Animal Feeding Operations, or CAFOs, produce enormous volumes of waste, and pollute watersheds and streams. It also means less in the way of greenhouse gas emissions, since the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations has reported that the animal agriculture sector worldwide accounts for 18 percent of all emissions—more than the entire transportation sector.
Unfortunately, some members of Congress don’t want the farm animal industries to do their fair share to combat the problem. Lawmakers aligned with the Farm Bureau and other ambassadors of agribusiness are actively working to exclude agriculture from the impact of any remedial actions to reduce climate change. As a result, you may hear from The HSUS soon to contact your lawmaker to turn this situation around.
As Gourmet’s editor Ruth Reichl noted in a powerful editorial about the detriment of raising so many animals for food on factory farms, “Now it is becoming increasingly clear that we ought to change our ways.”
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