The Guardian runs a One Health propaganda narrative today. WHY would you want to “phase out intensive farming” when famines are being pedicted?

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/may/25/monkeypox-disease-climate-change

… It is now payback time for nature. The more human
numbers have grown and we have encroached on wild spaces or imposed
unnatural conditions on other species, the more we have created the
ideal environments for viruses and pathogens to spill across species,
mutate and spread. HIV, Ebola, Lassa fever and monkey pox in Africa;
Sars and Covid-19 in China; Chagas, Machupo and Hantavirus in Latin
America; Hendra in Australia; Mers in Saudi Arabia – all have all
emerged in the past 75 years just as we have accelerated deforestation,
moved to cities, come closer to animals and created a global

Most
worrying for humans is not monkeypox, plague or even Ebola, which sound
dangerous and exotic but are actually more or less controllable now
with vaccines. Instead, the threat of a new bird flu,
just as likely to come out of a farm in New York or England as one in
China or Bolivia, now stalks humanity. Chicken is now the rich world’s
most popular meat and tens of millions of near-genetically identical
birds prone to catastrophic disease are being mass-reared at any one
time, often in unhygienic conditions, and are able to mix with wild
birds. It is only a matter of decades before a new highly pathogenic
avian influenza strain evolves to be easily transmissible between humans.

As
much by luck as good judgment, humans dodged a bullet with Sars in 2003
and to some extent with Covid, which so far has killed about 1% of
people infected. But major flu pandemics with very high mortality rates
come along every 30 years or so and we are well overdue the next. If we
are lucky we will find a vaccine fast and it will only kill 10-20% of
people it infects. If we are unlucky, it could be just as transmissible
as Omicron and as fatal as Ebola – in which case it would effectively be game over for much of humanity and the global economy.

But
we may have seen nothing yet. Climate change is now kicking in,
creating a hotter, sicker world with a potentially catastrophic impact
on disease. Global heating fundamentally changes the landscape of
disease by forcing or enabling species to survive in new places and mix
with others. Insects already kill about 700,000 people a year, but
global heating allows mosquitoes, mites, fleas, ticks and other vectors
to flourish in new areas, spreading dengue, chikungunya, and other
diseases to higher ground or to previously cooler climates.

Canadian
bacteriologists have shown how in times of great historical
environmental change – like now – pathogens jump more easily to new,
susceptible hosts. All they need is the opportunity for contact, and
warming does just that. Once they have expanded to new hosts, novel
variants are more likely to emerge, each with new infection capacities.

The
situation looks bleak, but it is well within human ability to repair
and turn this round. Science and new technologies are catching up with
vaccines for rare and neglected diseases, and global surveillance and
the early detection of potential virus spillovers in the wild can be
greatly enhanced. But above all, global finance can be directed to
improve creaking public health systems, especially in developing
countries. They are the first line of defence and the surest precaution
of disease containment.

The big lesson of
Covid – and now of monkeypox – is that much infectious disease has its
roots in ecological change. That means the health of the planet and the
health of humans and must be considered alongside that of animals. It
also means we should prepare now for the unexpected, invest in public
health as never before, stop cutting down the forests, address climate
change and phase out intensive farming. A “one health”, planetary
approach to health is the best – and possibly the only – hope we have.