By Larry Powell
About eight years ago (May, 2018), I reported on my blog, how
a rare, deadly and incurable virus called Nipah had first been identified nineteen years before in Malaysia (1999). It killed or hospitalized hundred of people. While fruit bats had probably been the initial carriers, the victims had all worked closely with pigs, which acted as intermediate hosts. To prevent the spread of the disease, more than a million hogs were euthanized, inflicting tremendous economic losses on the Malaysian economy.
By 2018, Nipah had re-emerged in India, sickening or claiming the lives of dozens more.
Today, the CBC is reporting two more cases of Nipah in India. This has prompted authorities in Thailand and Malaysia to step up airport screening to prevent its spread.
Nipah remains on the World Health Organization’s priority list of emerging diseases that could cause a global pandemic. It can be transmitted to humans from bats, pigs, contaminated food or other humans.
Despite all these warning signs, and despite high losses of hogs due to other diseases (like Manitoba's disastrous encounter with PEDv - above), Canada still doubles down on the factory-farm method of pork production.
This places thousands of animals in close proximity, (see image, above) elevating the risk of disease-spread. And feeding dead pigs back to live animals, as atrocious as that sounds, and banned in other countries, is still permitted by our federal “watchdog,” the Canada Food Inspection Agency. Does this sound like a responsible way to protect our vulnerable herds from Nipah or Nipah-like infections?
Read more about this in my book, The Merchants of Menace - Chapter 22 - Livestock Diseases - The Ugliness, The Suffering, the Peril, the Waste.
