The Golden Rule Retro and with a vengeance...

What We Do Onto Others...
Our Environment And Animals
Is Killing Us...

Michael Greger, M.D. writes about the potential of a deadly flu pandemic, the likes of which we have never seen brought about by factory-farm meat production.

The industrialization of the chicken and pork industries is thought to have wrought these unprecedented changes in avian and swine influenza. No one even got sick from bird flu for eight decades before a new strain, H5N1, started killing children in 1997. Likewise, in pigs here in the U.S. swine flu was totally stable for 8 decades before a pig-bird-human hybrid mutant virus appeared in commercial pig populations in 1998. It was that strain that combined with a Eurasian swine flu virus ten years later to spawn the flu pandemic of 2009, sickening millions of young people around the world.

Read the article by Kathy Frestone http://www.truthout.org/topstories/10910vh3

Connecting more dots...

Food Inc.
A documentary focusing on the dramatic changes in the food we eat, brought about by factory farming and factory meat production over the past fifty years is a great way to begin the day. After watching you'll probably skip that Egg McMuffin.

The key point is that the thousands of so called food items found in your local super-market were produced by a handful of corporations. Many have images of happy cows grazing on green pastures. The truth is that the beef in that next hamburger may contain tissue from a thousand or more cows who live their corn fed, hormone and antibiotic stuffed lives ankle deep in their own and neighbors feces. Yum!

That slab or chicken on your healthy Creaser salad was raised in the dark, so full of growth hormones that it matured in half the time of what used to be a normal chicken, so fast that its little legs can't hold its bolted body up. It is then placed on a factory cover belt of hooks and by the millions off they go to your local fast food joint, posh restaurant and market - 24/7.

Watch the trailer. http://www.foodincmovie.com
You can view the full film for less three dollars on demand...

End of the Line
Another documentary begins by describing how current factory fishing practices will strip mine the oceans leaving them fishless in a few of decades. Imagine a world without fish?
Watch the trailer. http://endoftheline.com

Earthlings
Another documentary is one of the most disturbing and violent I have seen. It is so because it dares to show what we do and have been doing to animals every day. The Golden Rule Retro.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6361872964130308142#

Simple solutions:
• Don't blame the corporations for producing products that YOU consume.
• Skip the meat and chicken altogether. The global risks far outweigh the benefits.
• Skip most of the fish - for the same reasons.
• Skip most of the so called food items in the market.
• Skip the factory-fast food. It's not what you think.
• Don't skip shopping at local farmers markets.

Most of all - Remember the Golden Rule.

Back to factory farms and the next pandemic.

Michael Greger, M.D.
Before the domestication of birds about 2,500 years ago, human influenza likely didn't even exist. Similarly, before the domestication of livestock there was no measles, small pox, and many other diseases that have plagued humanity since they were born in the barnyard about 10,000 years ago. The worst plague in human history was the 1918 flu pandemic triggered by a bird flu virus that went on to kill upwards of 50 million people.

The crowded, stressful, unhygienic trench warfare conditions during World War I that led to the emergence of the 1918 virus are replicated today in nearly every industrial chicken shed and egg operation. Instead of millions of vulnerable hosts to evolve within back then, we now have billions of chickens intensively confined in factory farms, arguably the Perfect Storm environment for the emergence and spread of hypervirulent, so-called "predator-type" viruses like H5N1.

The 1918 virus killed about 2.5% of the people it infected, 20 times deadlier than the seasonal flu. H5N1 is now killing 60% of infected people, 20 times deadlier than the 1918 virus. So if a virus like 1918 gained easy human transmissibility, it could make the 1918 pandemic--the deadliest plague ever--look like the regular flu.

The primary risk is not in the meat, but how meat is produced.

Once a new disease is spawned from factory farm conditions it may be able spread person to person, and at that point animals--live or dead--may be out of the picture.

The Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production, which included a former U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, concluded that industrialized animal agriculture posed "unacceptable" public health risks.

The American Public Health Association, the largest organization of public health professionals in the world, has called for a moratorium on factory farms. In fact the APHA journal, the American Journal of Public Health, published an editorial going beyond just calling for an end to factory farms. It questioned the prudence of raising so many animals in the first place:

"It is curious...that changing the way humans treat animals--most basically, ceasing to eat them or, at the very least, radically limiting the quantity of them that are eaten--is largely off the radar as a significant preventive measure. Such a change, if sufficiently adopted or imposed, could still reduce the chances of the much-feared influenza epidemic. It would be even more likely to prevent unknown future diseases that, in the absence of this change, may result from farming animals intensively and from killing them for food. Yet humanity does not consider this option....

Those who consume animals not only harm those animals and endanger themselves, but they also threaten the well-being of other humans who currently or will later inhabit the planet....

[I]t is time for humans to remove their heads from the sand and recognize the risk to themselves that can arise from their maltreatment of other species."

MG: We've known for 20 years that the immune function of those eating vegetarian may be superior to those eating meat. First published in 1989, researchers at the German Cancer Research Center found that although vegetarians had the same number of disease-fighting white blood cells compared to meat eaters, the immune cells of vegetarians were twice as effective in destroying their targets--not only cancer cells, but virus-infected cells as well. So a more plant-based diet may protect both now and in the future against animal-borne diseases like pandemic influenza.

Read the article by Kathy Frestone http://www.truthout.org/topstories/10910vh3
For more information on how to move toward a plant-based, vegan diet, check out Kathy Frestone's guide to conscious eating on HuffPost.

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