Loading a Gun

We’ve seen it numerous times in film: an unhinged individual popping a single bullet into a revolver, spinning the cylinder, and brazenly raising it to their temple for a game of chance. As a viewer the tension becomes palpable…you feel the beat of your heart… the absence of breath. And between the moment that the revolver kisses the character’s head, and the slow squeeze of the trigger, you’re rocketed to the brink of that thin line between life and death.

Of course, I’m describing the game known as Russian roulette. A treacherous game that I assume most humans want to avoid. But what if we’re already playing a game and just don’t know it? This may be the case when it comes to the concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFO) that produce nearly all the meat that Americans (and others) consume. We could talk about a variety of metaphorical bullets that CAFOs represent, but in the wake of COVID-19’s arrival, let’s focus on flu pandemic.

For decades experts have been warning that CAFOs represent a series of health threats to the public. Just one example is a conference that was held in Iowa City in 2004, where a global group of environmental scientists convened to explore the environmental impacts of CAFOs (link). Even then they knew that the ways in which livestock production changed in the 80’s and 90’s, moving to large scale feeding operations, was a threat in terms of air and water contamination, antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and influenza outbreaks. So, it’s not exactly new to report that experts have been warning of the relationship between CAFOs and pandemic for a long time - it’s just more timely than ever.

Sometimes it’s hard to wrap your head around warnings like this when you’re removed from the source of the issue, or the consequences aren’t sitting at your doorstep. It’s like climate change - it’s going to get real for people when it’s undeniably messing with some element that’s directly in their purview. Life-altering pandemic is no different, and if you needed a taste of it to understand just how much you don’t want it, welcome to 2020.

There are those that will treat COVID-19 as an aberration, something that’s a once-in-a-lifetime event that we just need to get through. They’ll view it through the tiny lens of here and now, without perspective and nuance. But that’s the thing, this delicate web of life that we all inhabit is more nuanced than we can fathom, and it’s been going on for so much longer than our brains can really comprehend. If we fail to understand that we may be loading the “pandemic gun” with more bullets than necessary, then COVID-19 may be less of a onetime event, and more a harbinger of things to come.

Plagues and Peoples

Several years ago I read a book called Plagues and Peoples. Written by William McNeil in 1976, the book is an examination of human history through the lens of infectious disease. It points out just how dramatically plague and disease have shaped the history of the world. From the Spanish conquest of the Aztec empire and their microscopic ally of smallpox, to the steamship network that rose in the 1870s and efficiently transmitted the bubonic plague around the globe, an examination of history and disease will have you wondering whether you’re ever paying attention to the right things… the things that truly shape the world as it’s known. With 2020 bringing me my first experience of life-altering pandemic, I couldn’t help but think back to the book and understand its lessons with a much deeper appreciation.

One exploration that is particularly eye-opening in the book, is that of sickle-cell disease - an inherited group of blood disorders that affect blood flow within the body. As you might imagine, a disease that affects proper blood flow produces a number of complications and leads to a lowered life expectancy. So how does an inherited disease that can produce such debilitating affects make it’s way through the ages and into the twenty-first century amongst millions of people? As it turns out…Malaria.

Malaria is a disease caused by a parasite that infects and is transferred to humans through the Anopheles mosquito. When one of these mosquitos feeds on a human infected with malaria, they get their blood meal with a side of malarial parasites. These parasites then incubate within the mosquito and form a parasite called a sporozoite, which migrates to the mosquito’s salivary glands. The next time the infected mosquito goes to wet it’s whistle on a human, it transfers the sporozoite parasite. Once inside the human host, the sporozoite migrates to the liver and begins yet another series of transformations that result in a transfer to and infection of red blood cells.

So how does this connect with sickle cell disease? People afflicted with sickle cell diseases have hemoglobin molecules that distort the shape of the red blood cell into that of a sickle. In terms of shapes, think of a crescent moon. These sickled cells can break down prematurely and have a hard time traveling through blood vessels because of their shape. Remember, red blood cells are the little vehicles transmitting oxygen throughout your body, so when they break down, it’s bad news. But here’s the thing about these sickle cells - because of their premature breakdown, they can make it hard for the malarial infection to take grip in the red blood cells. Thus, despite the many health complications that sickle cell diseases represent, natural selection didn’t remove it because it was beneficial in the face of malaria.

If you look at where malaria transmissions are most common, which includes sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, you’ll find that people with sickle cell diseases are typically from, or have ancestry tying to the regions (link). And while the examination of the link between sickle cell disease and malaria is extremely fascinating, it’s taken to new heights when you consider how malaria likely became so prevalent in these areas.

As previously described, Anopheles mosquitos are the little vehicles transmitting malaria around from human to human, so it would stand that an increase in malaria transmissions is probably due to more of these mosquitos and humans. But the thing about Anopheles mosquitos, as McNeil describes in Plagues and Peoples, is that they’re a weed species of mosquito, which means that they shows up and sub-plant other mosquito species - many of which don’t feed on human blood. In the case of Western Africa, the proliferation of Anopheles mosquitos may be tied to humans clearing out swaths of rain forest for agricultural purposes.

Consider a linear view of everything that’s just been described. You have the advent of agricultural practices, which leads to deforestration of the rain forest. Deforestation interrupts long-standing ecological balances, which leads to more Anopheles mosquitos and humans in a cohabitation. These mosquitos begin transferring malarial parasites between every human who enters the area. Those humans with the sickle cell trait are less affected by malaria, which ensures the trait’s survival as a genetic advantage within the environment.

In examining the survival of the sickle cell trait, we get to see how man’s alteration of the environment has far-reaching results that are sometimes difficult to fathom within our individual lifetimes. And in the case of deforestation for the purposes of agriculture, it’s something happening today on much larger scales than those that may have resulted in the proliferation of malaria and mosquitos in western Africa. The common root of needing to feed a growing human population is what connects the story of mosquitos, malaria, sickle cell disease, and CAFOs. Man began clearing the rain forest to grow food, and today we grow food by cramming thousands of pigs, chickens, and cows into small spaces.

We have to feed people, right? That’s always going to be the argument in favor of these large scale feeding operations. But the more we alter the delicate balances of nature, the more we don’t know what nature’s reaction is going to be. Yes we need food, but are CAFOs the best way to grow it? Even if you enjoy the cheap meat, don’t mind the animal cruelty, and couldn’t care less about the environmental impact of these feeding operations, the idea of them as fuel for future pandemic may give you pause. So let’s dig into why they might be the source of future pandemics that are more deadly and destructive than COVID-19.

Drift and Shift

When a flu virus enters your body your immune system tries to identify it. If it looks similar to something that it’s encountered before, then it may be able to produce the correct immune response and block the infection. The way your immune system tries to identify a virus is by examining its antigens - these are the surface level proteins that encapsulate its genome. If it helps, think of the protein case as a little pill with two barcodes on it that our immune system tries to scan. If there’s a match, you’re probably in luck… if not, you may get sick.

The idea of the seasonal flu shot is meant to try and figure out what the antigen barcodes are likely going to be so that you’re immune system can get a sample and get ready. But what manufacturers of flu shots don’t know, is exactly which strains may become prevalent, and how they may change and mutate over time. Slow incremental changes of a flu virus are know as “antigenic drift”, and are the result of it replicating over and over. A virus that your immune system has seen before can have some level of antigenic drift and still be identified, but the small changes can add up and result in something that is foreign. Again, think of those antigen barcodes slowly changing or degrading over time so that your immune system can’t scan it and identify it as easily.

While it’s easy to see how antigenic drift is problematic, there is a much more dramatic version of change known as “antigenic shift”. This type of change is associated with Influenza A viruses, which are those that can travel between humans and animals. As you might imagine, if a virus resides in animals and then makes the jump over to humans, the antigens of the virus may be so different that the human immune system has no idea what to do. With antigenic shift, it’s not just that the antigens have changed, it’s that they may be completely new.

A recent example of antigenic shift was the “Swine Flu”, or H1N1 virus from 2009, which was classified as a pandemic. This particular H1N1 virus is interesting because it was classified as a quadruple-reassortant virus. What that means is that it contained genes from four different influenza sources. In this case, and as detailed by the CDC, the gene segments were a combination of those originating from human influenza viruses, North American swine influenza viruses, North American avian influenza virus, and yet another set of swine influenza segments that are typically found in Asia and Europe (link).

2009’s H1N1 is a good example of swine being vulnerable to human and avian influenza viruses (along with their own). This is an important point because humans are not frequently infected with influenza viruses from domestic foul, but swine are. And because transmission between swine and humans are frequent and common, and go both ways (human to swine and swine to human), swine are viewed as an intermediary and have even been described as “a mixing vessel” (link). Multiple viruses between different species enter the pig, they get to know each other in the pig, and could then pop out in a radically novel form and infect humans.

The pandemic of 1918 was another example of an H1N1 virus, which was a flu that contained avian (bird) genes. Unlike the 2009 H1N1, 1918 was more deadly and far reaching. According to the CDC, the 1918 pandemic infected an estimated 500 million people and resulted in an estimated 50 million deaths (link). Back in 1918, 500 million people was a third of the world’s population.

If you think that the 1918 pandemic was devastating, consider that there are viruses like H5N1 (a “bird flu”) circulating that have killed up to 60% of those infected (link). In the wake of COVID-19’s arrival and how drastically it’s altered life, consider if it was 50 to 60 times more deadly. What would the world look like?

Adding More Bullets

Bird flus have already resulted in mass death of birds on commercial farms in recent years. Back in 2015 an estimated 50 million birds were killed from a highly pathogenic strain of avian influenza (H5N2). As reported by PBS, “Nearly 90 percent of the bird losses were on egg-laying chicken farms in Iowa and turkey farms in Minnesota.“ In terms of economic loss, the 50 million dead birds resulted in the loss of an estimated 3 billion dollars.

With such large amounts of money at stake, you can bet that large-scale commercial operations care about these outbreaks, but it seems that they’re more interested in surveillance of an outbreak than addressing the fundamental truth that their operations are breeding-grounds for them. In a recent 2020 outbreak of another high pathogenic strain of avian influenza, more than 32,577 birds were efficiently euthanized after 1500 birds were killed from the virus. Surveilling for outbreaks in order to quickly euthanize bird populations seems a bit like treating the symptom verses the problem.

So, consider that we have poultry being grown within conditions that are ripe for high pathogenic bird flu outbreaks. Consider that swine are also grown in CAFOs and it’s common for them to get flu viruses from domestic fowl, and it’s also common for them (swine) to pass flu viruses to humans. And remember how swine are a mixing vessel that can combine swine, human, and avian influenza virus, which can create flu viruses that our immune systems have never seen. Does this sound like a scenario that’s ideal?

When we place cows, chickens, or hogs into confined spaces, by the thousands, we are undeniably tinkering with nature. These animals would never congregate in the fashion that they’re kept. They would never just stand in place within their own waste, cramming food down their mouths, snouts, and beaks, while being pumped full of antibiotics and growing at freakishly fast rates. When we so drastically alter ecological balances, we’re plucking the strings of life’s web, causing changes that reverberate in the near-term and long-term. Remember the story of deforestation, malaria, and sickle cell?

All of this is to say that when humans get a flu virus that contains genes from different species, our immune systems may have no idea what to do. And while we likely have no way of avoiding pandemic, or even avoiding antigenic shift, we definitely don’t want to be doing things that could make the prospect of it more likely. Unfortunately, that may be exactly what we’re doing with the continuation of concentrated animal feeding operations. And as one study suggested, an estimated 99% of our meat comes from these sorts of feeding operations - considering this, perhaps we’re playing Russian Roulette with a machine gun.

Will these operations change overnight, or just go away because they represent existential threats to humanity? Of course not, there’s too much money wrapped up in it, and frankly, it’s how most of the meat we’re eating is grown. But if you look at the current system and think it sounds cruel and gruesome, or you’re worried about it bringing us the next Influenza pandemic, there is something you can do about it: stop supporting this system. No step is too small in casting your vote for what you like and don’t like in this world. You could decide to cut out one fast-food meal each week, or source your meat and/or produce from a local farmer through a CSA program. Perhaps you decide to drastically reduce, or end your meat consumption all together. The beauty of making these sorts of changes is that we get to vote (often with our pocketbook) on the world we want to see and support each and every day. You don’t have to wait every four years for an election to cast your vote… you have the power to do something today, right now.