An HSI report: The connection between animal agriculture, viral zoonoses, and global pandemics

The sources of pandemics can be as varied as the diseases they represent. This paper examines how pandemic and potentially pandemic zoonotic diseases as well as viruses spread directly from the agricultural environments where animals are used as immediate, intermediate or amplifier hosts.

The paper finds that the intensification and industrialization of animal agriculture creates a large, susceptible antigenically naive population, which nature will exploit. Meeting the demand for animal protein by ramping up intensive production around the world alters viral host dynamics, generating new pathways for the dissemination of viruses and the evolution of new viral strains. But industrialized farming is just one of many risk factors for the emergence and spread of disease, however intensively farmed animals play a critical role as intermediate hosts by bringing animal viruses, which would normally have little contact with alternative hosts, into close contact with people. While SARS-CoV-2 apparently emerged at a wildlife market, the next outbreak could just as easily be associated with intensive farming, as medical doctors and scholars have warned