Mothering Earth-144-Animal Agriculture & Public Health

The farming and annual slaughter of 10 billion cows, pigs, chickens, and other animals in the U.S. for food affects public health in multiple ways. Welcome to Mothering Earth, your source for sustainable living news. I'm Sawa Khan. The animal agriculture industry pollutes the air, water, and soil, but it also has serious negative effects on the health and lives of farm workers, and those who work in slaughterhouses as well as their surrounding communities and the public in general. My guest, Mark Riffkin, is a registered dietitian and nutrition educator who specializes in the practical application of plant-based diets. He's been researching the public health implications of animal agriculture. I asked him why. My initial motivations were animal ethics, but environmental protection and personal health eventually became part of my advocacy as well. One could also add advancing peace and social justice, avoiding a dangerous and impersonal healthcare system, reducing food expenses, and minimizing justifications for high taxes. Starting with current research, we can now add public health as well. In short, today's industrial model of animal agriculture, which I will call animal ag, is a public health nightmare. The conditions in production facilities in slaughterhouses are an ideal setting for worker injuries, as well as breeding and disseminating all sorts of pathogens, both viral and bacterial. These pathogens can infect not only the workers, but also their families and communities. Other community risks are also transmitted through the air of the flies, and particulate matter, originating from production and processing facilities, and even transport vehicles. Then we have the topic of pandemics, which could occupy an entire hour itself. These risks are heightened by climate change, which is directly linked, of course, to greenhouse gas emissions, such as methane from animal agriculture. The workers we're talking about are those on farms, and in what's called meat processing, such as animal slaughterhouses. What is their situation? These workers are often considered to be commodities, not people. Riches are poor, typically starting out or just above minimum wage. Full-time workers may be offered health insurance, but many may avoid calling out for illness or medical care appointments for fear of losing critical wages. Almost half of all ag workers lack health insurance due to exemptions coded into law, specifically for animal ag operations. They might apply to rules that might apply to a typical employer and a typical non-agsetting. Those rules are no longer in play for agricultural operations. In the production facilities, workers tend to be about half people of color and half Caucasian. In the slaughter plants, the workers were often undocumented migrants and refugees. We've also heard reports in the last three to five years about teenagers working the slaughter floor or in the likely cleanup crews, despite clear prohibitions otherwise. You can get an idea that these companies that not only operate the plants, but, of course, the companies frequently farm out, no pun intended, farm out cleaning operations to a third party who may, in fact, hire temporary workers, so, of course, somebody will certify that all their workers are legitimate, have a right to work, etc., etc., but they're relying on some guy who's relying on some guy who's relying on some guy who actually hired the worker. You can see where you have a bit of, shall we say, telephone here. What do we know about work conditions in a slaughterhouse? Well, in a word, brutal, that would not be an understatement. The workers were often treated almost as bad as the animals themselves. First, the animals are not only terrified, but potentially infected, making them fundamentally dangerous to the workers. Processing lines are characterized by equipment designed to kill, by definition, making them extremely hazardous, and then you have extremely high operating speeds, repetitive motions, and high volumes of slippery fluids, fat, tissues, and feces covering surfaces. Combining the screams of the animals with the equipment, we have noise levels that are frequently in the dangerous range. So pervasively, these levels can reach that about the same as a chainsaw times eight hours a day, adding the use of hazardous cleaning chemicals, and it's no wonder the total injury rates for slaughter plants are at least twice that of the mining industry. And in recent years, according to one report, it's the number one highest, it has the number one highest incidence rate of work related injury and illness. In short, it's a place nobody wants to be. We're listening to mothering earth, I'm Saul Wakhan here today with Mark Rifkin, he's a registered dietitian and nutrition educator, and we're talking about animal agriculture and its effect on public health. Regarding workers in a slaughterhouse, do they have any way to protect themselves from the dangers that they're exposed to? Personal protective equipment or PPE is legally required to prevent cuts and exposure to hazards. So this includes physical barriers for hands and arms, as well as barriers for. Let me rephrase that, physical cut barriers for hands and arms, and spray and liquid barriers for bodies such as in the form of aprons and smocks, as well as slip resistant footwear, head and eye protection, ear protection, and at times N95 respirators. However, violations, as we might expect are common, including failure to provide, repair, and/or replace required equipment. Why would they have to wear a mask? The workers are exposed to fluids that may spray accidentally, so animals come with not only several gallons of blood and lymph, but also, of course, the bladder may be full of urine, the intestine may be full of feces, and of course, they don't intend to puncture intestines, but it happens all the time. Or you puncture a bladder that happens to be full. When you release the pressure on a balloon, what's it going to do? It's going to spray. So that's aside from the unintended sprays of, say, cleaning fluids and other related chemicals. So, I would hope that every worker on a slaughter line has a face shield to protect them from being sprayed by any number of potential agents. Does the government, through OSHA, which is the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, have any safety regulations for slaughterhouses? Definitely. But there's no specific minimum frequency for inspections, which I find to be very odd. And I used to be in another life. I was a health inspector for local water wells and septic systems. And in general, you know, the fundamental rule of inspection is you don't necessarily rely on the information that's coming to you for a valid measure of a facility's operational quality. For obvious reasons, because the facility may not report, you know, media may not be a reliable source of information. And of course, the workers themselves, which they do have supposedly a secure portal to report. But, you know, workers probably are not going to be very eager to report violations, especially, you know, in the worst case scenario, the plant gets shut down. Okay. Now, the worker is out of a job. Even if the plant is shut down for only a day or two. Okay. Now the workers lost the two days of pay. So according to the OSHA occupational safety and health admin, they rely on injury rates, worker complaint, and known hazards for particular facilities. So you know, again, you can one can put lipstick on a proverbial cow. Everything looks great from our end. Hey, nobody's complaining. We don't have any news or information about, you know, hazards. Okay. There's no need to go to ABC. Right. Not necessarily a valid measure of objective performance. And OSHA, of course, is a routine target for criticism about its oversight or lack of oversight regarding slaughterhouse workers. OSHA and I also note OSHA and USDA are currently collaborating on a new rule that would allow them to allow pigs slaughterhouses specifically to set their own line speeds. So up till now, line speeds are in another words, the rate at which animals or carcasses moved down the line is set by government rule. Under this new proposal, which is currently under review, the industry will set their own line speed. And the government will basically say, oh, you can handle it. We trust you. The other sector of animal agriculture is raising the animals. The KFO, which is a concentrated animal feeding operation, is where most of the meat eaten in the U.S. comes from, rather than from some pastoral ranch or farm, how does this industrial model the KFO create risks for human health? Something like 95 to 98% of all the animal foods are produced in industrial production facilities. Beyond exposures to the workers, the communities are put at risk as workers carry all manner of contaminants and pathogens home to their families, their neighbors and their communities. Neighboring communities adjacent to factory farms or KFOs, which of course are usually communities of color, often suffer from respiratory issues and nuisance odors. And ammonia and particulates were the subject of one specific article. So we now know that ammonia and particulates from KFOs are now calculated to kill 13,000, about 13,000 Americans every year. And you'll just from the ammonia and the particulates, not taking into account, you know, diet lifestyle, they're just being killed by what's in the air. And those facts assume normal weather conditions. Let's add increasingly severe weather conditions due to climate change. So now we have a hurricane on top of say an open air waste lagoon, such as hog waste, which are extremely common in North Carolina and Iowa. Okay. Well, do you know any state that's had problems with hurricanes in the last couple of years? Yeah, North Carolina has had a lot of hurricanes. So these lagoons, which are basically it's a Seth pit holding several tens of millions of gallons of hog waste. And they burst sometimes with the assistance of hurricane, sometimes just due to their own poor structure and construction. About 20 years ago or 25 years ago, one of them burst releasing 25 million gallons of hog waste across the North Carolina countryside. And that was without a hurricane. Now let's add, you know, hurricane Florence went right through North Carolina. And if I'm not mistaken, I believe they had 33 lagoons. First, during the hurricane Florence, 33 lagoons. I can't even imagine what that's like. So now imagine people are ordered to evacuate through flood waters contaminated with millions of gallons of putrid and pathogenic hog waste. You're listening to mothering earth. I'm Saul Akhan here with Mark Rifkin, registered dietician and nutrition educator. Is there any way for people in communities adjacent to KFOs to protect themselves from these risks? Well, there's two key pathways. One is via government. And one is with your neighbors and communities. So for government, I wouldn't expect much from the federal government. The best chance for change is via the local government. So I encourage people to get active and advocating for yourselves and your communities with your state legislators, your governor and state agencies. Because we know the government is hearing from industry lobbyists guaranteed. We don't want their message to be the only message that's heard. It needs to ensure that an alternative message is being heard by policymakers. So that means attending public events, hearings, monitoring legislation, even volunteering for campaigns with responsive policymakers. And that can be from either party. And I will demonstrate that with an example I had with a local legislator. I did share his political party, but he was not my state representative. He represented a neighboring district. But I liked what he had written in public media. And I went out to meet him at a public event. I didn't expect anything from him. He didn't know me and I didn't know him. Never met him before. Within five minutes, he was asking me to volunteer for his campaign, which I did actually. And I had never done that before either. So I think I held signs on road sides during his reelection campaign for maybe a total of six to 10 hours total across a couple of months. Ten years later, he still knew my name. You know them. They know you. They know your priorities. They know your concerns. And they say, Oh, yeah, I've heard from neighbors and communities about this issue. Maybe I should contact them and see what they think about this new proposal. And in fact, when we had changes to a law that we wanted to make, this particular legislator literally called the people who input text into bills. And he said, online 29 page six, we're going to add this text based on the request from myself and my colleagues. That's the kind of relationship you want. But unfortunately, most Americans are, shall we say, disconnected to put it politely from government at all levels. They don't know who their state representatives are. They might know their governor's name, but that's a probably about it. But, and of course, that's the same scenario, you know, the industry is going to ensure that their message is heard. The public needs to ensure and do the same. Because we can't let industry dominate the total message environment. But that's what's happening right now. So if the legislators don't know the public's concerns, who are they going to side with? They're going to side with the message they hear, which is industry. And that's a side that's a side from all the corporate campaign finance, which of course is influencing elections at all levels of government. So that's the government pathway. The second pathway is establishing intersectionality with other communities. So that means environmental justice communities with the animal rights community, with environmental advocates, with labor unions, with civic and neighborhood associations, with food justice, with nutrition advocates, and civil rights and migrant advocates, and public health advocates. Everybody's got a proverbial bone, no pun intended. Everybody's got a bone in this fight. And they're not, but they're not going to win any substantial gains independently. Now, of course, you know, no two communities are going to agree 100% on anything. But we, all these communities share much more in common than their differences. So the only way that we collectively are going to win this fight is by partnering and establishing really fundamental relationships with other communities. So it fragmented we're never going to win, especially against billion dollar industries. But together, collective strength can really turn the tide. Another related threat is pandemics. In what way are pandemics related to animal agriculture? The background for pandemics, and which I didn't know until I started researching this a few years ago, is more than 50% of all diseases. Infectious diseases, that is, that can infect humans, originate in some form of animal, more than half. More than 75% of all the emerging infectious diseases are coming from livestock, within a little bit from wildlife. So, animal agriculture, of course, drives climate change. And that is altering food production and economies of local communities who are often already living on the edge without climate change. So that's forcing communities to encroach on natural habitat or exploit wildlife or forces the wildlife to actually shift their habitat. So that increases human animal interactions, ultimately increasing pathogen exposure. So this is one of two likely paths for COVID-19. And it's exactly the same scenario happening as we record this with Ebola, which I understand originates in certain bats. Ebola, of course, depending on the strain, can kill up to 90% of people infected. And of course, also depending on what kind of medical care they have available. So the more we, the more the human population expands, and of course we all know we're well over 8 billion people right now. So by definition, you know, the expanding human population is creating excessive pressure on wildlife and ecosystems. So human and wildlife interactions are inevitable. And inevitably some of those pathogens will be infectious to humans, not just their wildlife hosts. And then of course then you have the livestock workers that are, you know, literally handling the animals themselves, that are potentially pathogenic. So they are literally carrying their, you know, breathing the pathogens. It's on their clothes. It's on their person. It's on their skin. Of course, if they already have an existing laceration, well, now their bacteria is potentially in their bloodstream, not to mention in their respiratory pathway. And then of course they carry it home. And this is fairly well documented. One research article said industrial agriculture production is an ideal environment, quote-unquote, for generating transmission and allowing of course the viruses to mutate into forms that can potentially infect humans. So every time they find out a virus finds a new host, it mutates and it's kind of like spinning a roulette wheel. Eventually that virus is going to spin the right wheel and it's going to hit on a genetic combination that's going to be infectious to people. So we are literally creating a public health pandemic disaster. And of course, yeah, I'm sorry, meat production unfortunately is not declining whether, you know, globally or domestically. Another issue that affects public health is the use of antibiotics in animal agriculture and the resulting creation of antibiotic resistance. For those who may not be aware, so roughly 70 to 80% of all medically important antibiotics for humans are produced for animal ag. And the FDA has recently restricted their use so the proverbial wild west setting that we used to have, well, in print, it's not supposed to be present, shall we say. Whether the FDA has adequate tools to enforce that standard, no, I think that's another question. And of course, it's open to interpretation by the producer and the veterinarian that they may hire and what is or is not considered a legitimate use of a particular antibiotic for a particular animal or herd of animals. So but we do know that every time you we use an antibiotic, even in ourselves, much less in animals, we don't kill all the individual bacteria. Even if antibiotic is considered to be highly effective, it cannot possibly kill 100%. It may kill 90 or 95%, unfortunately, the ones that survive are resistant. So they unfortunately grow and propagate. And as we learned in recent research, the bacteria communicate, the exchange genetic material, well, you give me your gene for X and I'll give you my gene for Y. And before you know it, we have species, bacteria species that are, they're literally creating resistance and transmitting resistance in between species. How is it that even people who don't eat meat such as vegetarians and vegans can be affected? Well, a couple of pathways, number one, they're now using manure, not only on feed crops for livestock, but they're now using manure on food crops. So your carrots could literally be fertilized with manure. So now, of course, not only do you have the potential pathogen risk of that manure, as I recently learned a couple of years ago, antibiotics are in the manure. And then here comes the guy with calmenor that suppose, even if they sterilize it, even if it is sterile from a bacterial point of view, that doesn't kill the antibiotic. So now you're spraying, literally spraying your carrots with antibiotics, unbelievable. And this is allowed even under certain parts of the national organic program. So manure can be used under the national organic program. So you still may have viruses, you'll definitely have heavy metals, hormones that may be injected into the animal. So anything that that animal was exposed to is potentially into manure. And then, of course, unless vegans are living in a bubble, which generally we don't, then we're still going to be likely exposed to communities that can transmit threats like viruses or bacteria, or we could be in natural settings that create risks, such as these algae that grow in waterways that are contaminated by animal waste, the algae themselves are hazardous to human health. And anybody exposed to that water is exposing themselves to all manner of potential toxins. What can people do to avoid some of these risks? Well, of course, if people are not already vegan, I recommend, of course, people develop a plan to specifically reduce their land animal foods to zero, or as close to zero as they can possibly get. Not only does that reduce the threat or risk that they bring to themselves and others, but it also deprives the industry of the money that industry uses to fight for their alleged right to pollute, and too many advocacy organizations, they fight tooth and nail against the industry, but they never recommend people to boycott the animal product. Why? The industry is literally using consumers to fight consumers, it's using their money. Imagine if the chicken and hog industries literally were starving for cash. Would they be able to fight and, you know, bribe politicians? No, they wouldn't. Thanks so much to my guest, Mark Rifkin, who's a registered dietitian and nutrition educator, and thanks so much to you for listening. Our website is mothering-earth.com. Until next time, this is Saul Wakhan signing off, or mothering-earth, your source for sustainable living news. The views and opinions expressed on mothering-earth do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of this station.