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Doctors urge UK to cut meat intake to avoid future pandemic
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IANS | 22 May, 2020
The UK needs to drastically cut back its meat intake to avoid a future global health crisis, a group of doctors have warned.
Plant
Based Health Professionals (PBHP) said that the connection between
major disease outbreaks and factory farming is being "swept under the
carpet" amid the coronavirus pandemic, as they join a wave of experts
urging people to go vegan, the Metro newspaper reported.
The
vast majority of new infectious diseases that have appeared in humans
over the past century have been caused by tampering with farmed animals
and their habitats, including Swine Flu (pigs), Avian Flu (birds) and
Spanish Flu (poultry).
Speaking to the Metro newspaper, PBHP
founder and Consultant Haematologist at King's College Hospital, Shireen
Kassam, said that another disease outbreak was "inevitable if we do not
move towards a plant-based diet".
In the UK, demand for cheap
meat has fuelled a huge expansion of factory farming – a controversial
process that often sees thousands of animals being packed into small,
unsanitary cages.
This "provides the perfect conditions for the
generation of novel infections with epidemic and pandemic potential" as
well as necessitating the widespread use of antibiotics in animals,
"contributing to a crisis in antibiotic resistance among humans", Kassam
said.
"The last 100 years has shown that pandemics will continue unless we change the way we eat and how our food is produced.
"Disease
is spread predominantly through confinement, we don't have the land
capacity to feed the 8 billion people on this planet free range.
"We
are in this race to find an antiviral, but other than HIV, there are
very few viruses where there are very effective drugs available. (A
vaccine) isn't just going to save our problems, there is a risk of a
mutation that could come back in a few years.
"We need to learn
from our mistakes. We need to change our land use to grow beans and
legumes, we need a system change," she told the newspaper.
Poor
diets are the main cause of chronic health conditions in adults in the
UK, while pre-existing health conditions such as obesity and diabetes
are seen as risk factors in catching COVID-19, which has infected
252,246 peopled and killed 36,124 in the country so far.
Research
from the University of Oxford last year found foods with the largest
negative environmental impacts such as unprocessed and processed red
meat, were linked with the largest increases in disease risk, while
foods associated with improved health (whole grain cereals, fruits,
vegetables, legumes, nuts and some vegetable oils high in unsaturated
fats, such as olive oil) have among the lowest environmental impacts.
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