Thread by @davidfickling

Today I wrote about the relationship between the Wuhan #coronovirus
outbreak, China's push to feed itself, urbanization, globalisation, and the role of trust in society.

The article is at the link. Here's the thread version:

bloomberg.com/amp/opinion/ar…

Epidemics are a side-effect of urbanization. Until we started living in cities about 5,000 years ago, we simply lived far apart for most diseases to spread to vast populations.

One of the first recorded ones was the Plague of Athens in about 430BC, which ended that city's ambitions to be a major regional power

It was described by the great historian Thucydides, who was himself infected.

They became pandemics -- continent- or world-wide epidemics -- with the dawn of globalization.

The Black Death spread around the Eurasian trade routes opened up by the Mongol conquests.

Smallpox killed up to 90% of Indigenous people in the Americas and Australia after it was introduced, often deliberately, by European invaders.

From a virus's perspective, there's been a third revolution in the spread of disease in the last 50 years or so to match urbanization and globalization: factory farming.

With the rise of intensive farms since the 1960s we've been essentially urbanizing the global livestock population.

That's a big deal because there's three times more farm animals than people:

The world has ~7.7 billion 👩🏾
1 billion 🐄
1 billion 🐷
1 billion 🐑
20 billion 🐓 !

So far this process is far more advanced in rich countries. More than 95% of pigs and chickens in the U.S. are raised in farms with more than 1,000 and 100,000 animals, respectively:

China has been relatively slow to catch up.

A surprisingly large share of its pigs and chickens are still raised in back yards and in "traditional" mid-sized multi-product farms.

But most of the growth in meat production is from intensive farms:

Remember, from a virus's perspective we're all of us -- people, chicken, pigs -- just cells and bodies to infect.

As the transmissable population goes up, the number of opportunities to develop virulent new mutations goes up too.

The origins of H5N1 avian flu appear to be connected to the rise of rice paddy farming and intensive poultry farming in the 1980s and 1990s in wetlands in eastern China visited by migratory birds.

H1N1 swine flu is more mysterious but seems to have diverse origins in the pork and chicken industries in Europe, Asia and North America.

One reason we're not all drowning in pandemics is that the livestock industry, because of the disease vector risk, is justifiably paranoid about biosecurity.

But that's the thing. We really are dependent on the quality of regulation to keep a lid on disease risks.

That obviously fell down in China in the case of SARS (which seems to have come not from livestock but bats, another animal that lives in urban-like conditions).

Nearly two decades on the Chinese government seems to be more proactive in tackling these issues, with the entire city of Wuhan now placed under lockdown.

I suspect it's too early to draw firm conclusions about the effectiveness of this, though: bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

Regulation better be improving, because with each year that passes China's livestock industry grows more intensive.

Some local practices are particularly worrying. While western factory farms are monocultures, in many Asian ones pig and poultry feces are washed into intensive fishponds as feed, with waste fishmeal then fed back to the pigs and poultry.

This is very "efficient" in terms of climate and cost (if pretty gross).

But as someone who grew up in Britain in the 1990s, when cows developed BSE from eating ground up cows and sheep, I find the disease potential alarming.

The other thing I remember from Britain in that era is the importance of trust.

When foot-and-mouth disease broke out in the UK in 2001, farmers already *hated* the Labour government and there was a lot of concern about flouting of cull and quarantine regulations.

Trust is a big problem in biosecurity. To preserve the common good, a lot of individual farmers may have to take actions with considerable personal costs, such as culling.

If trust and incentives aren't properly aligned you have the SARS situation.

Trust is also one of the issues that societies have to negotiate as they urbanize. China is in many ways the most consistently urbanised society on the planet, but even the government admits there's a serious trust deficit nowadays.

It's rather miraculous and reassuring how we've managed the disease risks around our intensive livestock systems over the decades, but we shouldn't underestimate the scale of vigilance that requires.

I enjoy eating meat. But for the sake of our climate, the welfare of our livestock, and our own safety from pandemics, we should all do our best to limit our consumption.

Read the piece here: bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…