Epidemiology and the Poultry Industry / Boyce Upholt

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4.9 • 937 Ratings

🗓️ 21 September 2022

⏱️ 79 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Investigative journalist Boyce Upholt wrote The New Republic article, "Will the Next Pandemic Start With Chickens?: This spring, a virulent strain of bird flu ripped through U.S. farms. The public hardly noticed. That we could ignore the disease shows just how little we’ve learned about the origin of new viruses."

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're welcome, Neil.
0:22.6	This is a welcome, Neil.
0:25.0	This is hell.
0:39.0	Live from late capitalism where we know the price of everything but the value of nothing. This is hell. Today is the last day of summer with fall beginning on Thursday, September 22nd. A year ago the Delta variant of COVID was detected and the CDC
0:44.7	recommended boosters to combat the new version of the virus. Only a couple
0:48.9	short months later, right around Thanksgiving also recognized as a national day of morning. A new omicron
0:55.0	variant was discovered and 10 months later we are now only now finally getting a
1:01.1	booster designed to stop the latest version of the virus.
1:04.0	As epidemiologist Rob Wallace explained on our show back during those first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic,
1:11.0	the virus is zo-onotic in nature, pun intended. That is, it is
1:17.6	transferred from animals to people and again as Rob pointed out, it has a lot to do with deforestation leading to human contact with animals that carry diseases to which we have no natural immunity.
1:30.0	All around the world, epidemiologists like Rob, as well as virologists are constantly looking for the next flu, the next influenza that might be as deadly as the so-called Spanish flu of
1:40.8	1918 that killed tens of millions globally. This year so far we seem to have
1:48.4	dodged any new variant bullet of COVID leading some to say the pandemic is over and then immediately
1:57.2	stepping back from that claim with AIDS still claiming a million lives a year it's as if these epidemics never really end.
2:05.9	Then there are new possible public health threats like the massive chicken flu epidemic that struck
2:13.2	chicken farms across the United States in the late spring and into the summer.
2:16.8	You may not have heard about it as it did not get much national news coverage and
2:21.5	why should you be concerned after all it was deadly
2:24.7	to chickens not humans but that's the problem here in the US and in the UK there have
2:29.4	been human victims who lost their lives this summer's avian flu.
2:34.5	It all goes back to an avian flu outbreak in 1997 in Hong Kong when the virus jumped
	...

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