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Comment by alex_young | Hacker News Reader

There's an easier way to prevent animal nexus illnesses. This includes SARS, COVID, MERS, Ebola, E Coli, and many others. This change would have a byproduct of massively reducing greenhouse gas emissions and improving the life expectancy of billions of people.

Unfortunately there is no sign people will do this.

It requires a switch to a plant based diet.

It's really a shame that so few people will consider a change that would personally benefit them and everyone around them.

EDIT: Instead of downvoting, why not respond? I'm happy to hear your alternate opinion.

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Dairy-eating vegetarian here, but I disagree.

1) The vast majority of consumed meat comes from animals that have so closely co-evolved with humans that any pathogens that can plausibly jump from one to the other already has (with sometimes devastating effect). If we simply limited meat consumption to cows, pigs, and chicken, it'd satisfy most people and strictly limit the risk of novel zoonetic pathogens.

2) Those diseases you list in particular are mostly unconvincing: SARS and COVID likely come from bats via civets, MERS from bats via camels, Ebola from bats via primates. None of these species make up most meat consumption.

3) E. coli is the best example, but plenty of people do get it from lettuce and spinach. That said, E. coli is never going to shut down the world in a mass pandemic.

Thanks, I appreciate the dialog.

What do you think about H5N1 (Avian Flu)? This is an example of a disease carried by birds, passed to domesticated birds, and then on to humans. What about H1N1 (Swine Flu)? Both of these diseases required culling millions of livestock due to the very real crossover to human populations globally.

Are you aware that there are intermediate hosts in many coronavirus epidemics? Many of those involve domesticated livestock such as chickens, pigs, and cows[1].

E. coli isn't naturally found on greens since it requires an animal host. How does it keep getting there? Interaction with domestic livestock[2].

If we are going to continue our interaction with livestock in the way we are now, we should at least all be aware that this is a conscious choice which will result in pandemics on a somewhat regular basis.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Animal_origins_of_human_c... [2] https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/08/29/642646707/in...

> switch to a plant based diet

It amazes how incendiary this is. People even on HN will frequently respond to such a thing by boasting with adolescent glee how much meat they eat.

It's easy to feel like we live in an advanced era with our internet and gadgets, but I often think about how far we still have to go as a species.

To our credit, it was only yesteryear that our tools were stone and fur and tribes. Not easy to evolve past that.

Given that consumption isn't the only way that disease spreads from animals to humans, you're missing the step two of "exterminate all non-human animals".

Or think about just ending domestication of animals full stop. Maybe it's having grown up without pets but I don't understand the need.

You imply that people dismiss vegan diets out of habits and not because of the shoddy science, bad health outcomes, and all of the lies coming from this cult.

Cult! Ha!

As I understand the animals that infected humans in the case of SARS and MERS where respectively civet cats and camels. Neither of those are generally bred for food consumption.

I believe you need to have some sort of privilege to switch to a plant based diet. It's not cheap, especially in america where fast food is so accessible, cheap, and satisfying. Fresh produce is expensive and calories per dollar doesnt make any sense. Sure beans and grain sounds great, but in practice gets boring very quickly.

I agree with you that switching to a plant based diet is better for the environment and would prevent 99% of these diseases, but most people simply dont have the resources to do so, and the cultural dependence on meat will be near impossible to change.

> Sure beans and grain sounds great, but in practice gets boring very quickly.

That is basically what Indian food is, and I assure you it's far from boring. Almost too exciting sometimes, IMO.

There's no way it's more expensive in a free (with externalities priced-in) market. Meat eats plants in a very lossy fashion. The main problem for your average Joe is that it's quite hard to get started cooking tasty meals this way. I've tried many times and I can kinda manage with these frozen "patties" and such but it's just hard to flip thousands of years of cooking tradition. You can tell when you have some Ethiopian or Indian veggie food that it's been honed to perfection over centuries. Where I'm from all the dishes include meat or animal fat/broth which is honestly even harder to replace than the protein.

When you go from chicken broth or bacon fat to a vegetable broth or coconut butter, it's just a jump too far to make the dish still make any sense and that's the kind of moments where most people give up.

Most historical foodways across the world involve plant-centered diets providing most sustenance for the majority of the population. We've lost these foodways in the USA, but they're not resource intensive and are, if anything, better suited to mass production and distribution than meats.

The issue is that people don't like how they taste compared to meat.

It’s been horrifying to read about the slaughter of thousands upon thousands of pigs by allowing them to cook alive in their pens, simply because of a “drop in demand.”

If people want to understand the nihilistic impulses behind some of those pushing to “reopen the economy,” they’d do well to observe how livestock are being treated in this moment of crisis. The belief in their entitlement to impose misery and death on life that’s “beneath them” isn’t limited to animals.

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