Contents:
H5N1 and Food Chains
COVID and Workplace Fatalities
H5N1 and Food Chains
There has been a lot lately related to H5N1. It’s VERY concerning that it has shown up in more mammal species because that means the virus is more adapted to the mammalian respiratory tract, but also because of the impacts of the virus on both poultry and cattle. The CDC has a page about the history of H5N1 since 2020.
There is a LOT to unpack in this story. First, most people don’t know the dark side of the egg industry. Chickens are bred either to be layers or broilers for eating. Male layers obviously can’t lay eggs and aren’t profitable as a human food source. What gets done to them might disturb a lot of people. This includes gassing them to death with carbon dioxide, manually breaking their necks, or running them through a macerator. The video is rather graphic, so skip it if you would be bothered by it.
What happens to the ground up chicks and eggshells? It varies by country and laws, but in general, they become a component of pet food, large animal food, or organic fertilizer.
Even if chicks aren’t used in this way and are part of the layer or broiler populations, they still enter the animal food chain. The urine, feces, spilled chicken food, and feathers are used as food for cattle.
Something similar happens with butchered pigs and cattle. The portions that aren’t used for human consumption go through a rendering process. One of the products of rendering is bone meal. It is used in human dietary supplements, as an organic fertilizer, and as animal feed.
Another common product from rendering is meat meal. It is often combined with bone meal for use in the production of pet and livestock foods. In relation to H5N1, there are obviously some concerns about the safety of this practice, such as an example of 38 cat deaths in a South Korean animal shelter linked to pet food.
Some of the above has been banned in other countries, but the agriculture industry has a very strong lobbying presence in the US.
Many diseases can be transmitted through livestock feeding practices. One that eventually impacted humans was a disease in sheep called scrapie, which got its name for the characteristic behavior of inflicted sheep which would rub their sides against objects, leading to bald patches where wool would normally be.
Scrapie is a transmissible spongiform encephalopathy, or what is commonly called mad cow disease, caused by infectious proteins called prions. The proper name in cows is bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) and in humans, Creutzfeld-Jakob disease (CJD). It eventually became apparent that BSE was likely the result of rendering the brains of sheep to become cattle feed.
Mad cow disease was identified in Britain in 1986. In the early 90s, a health advisory board in Britain proclaimed that cattle were a “dead-end host.” Eventually that assessment was proven wrong, and the first death related to BSE transmitted to humans occurred in 1995. It was called new variant CJD (nvCJD or vCJD were both used).
Oddly enough, the same “dead end host” language had been used about cattle in relation to H5N1. The first cases of H5N1 showed up in cattle just over two weeks ago, but by April 1, that “dead end host” assumption was proven wrong with a cattle to human transmission.
As an aside, if the story of prion diseases through food interests you, I highly recommend this excellent book by Richard Rhodes.
We are already seeing cracks (pun intended) in the egg supply chain. Realistically, this will likely result in the culling of over 2 million chickens.
The simple take away is that we are stepping into uncharted waters in relationship between the food supply and H5N1. I would really urge people to take emergency preparedness seriously. I generally point people to https://www.do1thing.com/ because of their approach of ongoing preparedness.
COVID and Workplace Fatalities
Most of my week has been consumed with H5N1, but I had an idea about where to look for more data suggesting impacts from COVID in industry. I realized that fatal work injuries might tell something of a story about risks of death in the workplace from brain fog and other neurological injury from COVID. In the last two years, the rate of workplace deaths either matched or exceeded the prior highest rate since the start of this data set in 2012.
