Community
Print
Vegan activist and Co-Founder of Surge Earthling Ed has linked animal exploitation to zoonotic diseases in an attempt to ‘shift the blame away from Asia’ – as part of a new campaign.
In a YouTube video titled ‘CORONAVIRUS: How Did it Really Start & How Do We Stop it From Happening Again?’ Ed shows how ‘many of the world’s deadliest outbreaks are directly linked to the exploitation of animals by humans’.
The topic will be explored in greater depth in an upcoming white paper, that brings together findings from leading authorities on infectious diseases including the World Health Organization (WHO), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE).
‘Emerging infectious diseases’
In a statement sent to Plant Based News, Surge said: “The CDC warns that three out of four new or emerging infectious diseases in people come from animals… For example, HIV started because of humans eating chimpanzees and the recent ebola outbreak started because of people eating bats.
“Furthermore, BSE and the human equivalent vCJD is believed to have started in the UK because farmers were feeding dead infected cattle back to cattle, forcing them to cannibalise, and an ancestral strain of swine flu was traced back to a pig farm in North Carolina.”
‘Extreme cases of xenophobia’
“These zoonotic diseases can be created in any country and the one thing they all have in common is that they started because of our exploitation of animals,” Ed says in the video.
“COVID-19 is just the latest in a long history of deadly diseases created because of what we do to animals and it will not be the last, and what awaits us in the future could potentially be even more deadly and destructive.
“It’s easy for us to blame China for what is happening because it removes accountability for our own actions. But there have been extreme cases of xenophobia, where Chinese people have been assaulted simply for being Chinese. Yet, as history shows us, the problem isn’t.”
