Page 19 - UK The Official Veganuary Starter Kit
P. 19
THE OFFICIAL VEGANUARY STARTER KIT
GLOBAL HEALTH
ZOONOTIC DISEASES ANTIBIOTIC RESISTANCE
Eating animal products, as we have seen, The vast majority of farmed animals are reared
can raise the risk of diseases that rob us of intensively in cramped, filthy conditions
our health, our wellbeing and the people that weaken their immune systems while
we love the most. But animal farming has simultaneously exposing them to squalor.
the power to kill people on a devastating Unsurprisingly, diseases on such farms are
scale, through the diseases it breeds and the rife. But instead of providing better conditions,
antibiotics that it uses. the industry doses the animals with antibiotics
Many infectious diseases that people suffer and in overusing them, it has helped antibiotic-
from today – including whooping cough, resistant strains of superbugs to emerge.
leprosy and measles – are thought to have In 2016, Dr Margaret Chan, Director-General
originated in the animals we farmed, and this of the World Health Organization said:
transfer of diseases from farmed animals to ‘Antimicrobial resistance, as I say again and
people is far from over. Avian influenza (‘bird again, is a slow-motion tsunami. It is a global
flu’), for example, still infects and kills people crisis that must be managed with the utmost
every year. Such viruses mutate, and when urgency.’
14
17
they do there is a chance they can be spread In order to reduce the vast amounts of
more easily and become more deadly, which antibiotics given to animals, we must end
is what happened in both 1918 and 1957 factory farming, and we can only do that when
when millions of people died. There is a clear people stop buying animal products.
15
connection between the current COVID-19
crisis and the global food system based on
animal products, which contributes to the
destruction of ecosystems and can lead to the
transmission of infectious diseases from wild SARA PASCOE,
COMEDIAN AND
animals to humans, according to leaders at VEGANUARY
the UN, WHO and WWF International. 16 AMBASSADOR, SAYS:
“I decided that I was going to do 100
days being vegan, and I was going
to write it up and see how I felt. But
within a week I felt so much better in
my body that it then became oh I am
definitely going to do this forever.”
19 RETURN TO INDEX
