The End of Medicine

It all felt deeply unethical.

I went in with pure intentions to make a difference.

It really was every day that I'd cry.

And then [ think I was just suddenly like,

"I can't do another day of this."

I just want to share my story

and I want people to know what I've learned about disease.

We have seen multiple episodes over the past several years

where viruses have emerged that have caused cause for concern.

And, thankfully, to date, time and time again,

measures that have been taken by governments,

measures have been taken by W.H.O.

have managed to combat those outbreaks.

I think the whole of the medical community

is mindful and slightly fearful

that eventually there might come a time

where such a virus can't be contained.

There are two sets of laws that we have

that control human behavior.

One is the laws that we make.

And, in those laws, they say from time to time,

"It's okay to do this. It's okay to do that."

Well, it may be okay and it may be lawful

but nature has its own set of laws.

And when you, or we as people, violate those laws,

then nature responds with a consequence all of its own.

And it can be a consequence

that we, as humans, can't tolerate.

We're creating these scenarios

in which viruses can mutate in that way.

It really feels like there's So many alarms going off

and it just isn't being spelled out.

[pensive classical instrumental]

I'm Alice Brough and I used to be a livestock vet

so I worked for about four years

in the British pig industry.

And I left that about a year ago.

As soon as I was old enough to understand

there was a job that was involving helping animals,

that was the career for me

and I didn't ever consider anything else.

It was like, as soon as I could speak, I wanted to be a vet.

Since I sort of turned 15,

I started working on farms every holiday.

And then the veterinary degree is five years long.

So, so considerable amount of time put towards it, really.

So the year before I left,

I was actually a finalist for Young Pig Vet of the Year.

I really put everything into it.

I tried incredibly hard to... To achieve what really

was my aim was to improve the lives of animals.

And I, yeah, it was a...

It was a tough job and I put everything into it.

So, um, why have you since left that job?

Um... that's a tough question.

I think the more I went on,

the more I struggled with the sort of concern

that I was facilitating something

which would be potentially very dangerous

to human health further down the line.

I felt I've had to step back from that role

to feel like I'm not contributing

to some of the biggest threats to humanity

in the form of pandemics and antimicrobial resistance.

There are many different diseases

that have led to pandemics over the history of time.

And there's typically some sort of link

between human health and animal health

within those types of pandemics.

About half of infectious diseases people can get

can be spread from an animal or be zoonotic.

And for emerging infectious diseases, particularly,

scientists estimate that three out of every four

emerging infectious diseases come from an animal source.

Well, the truth is,

when you look at the origins specifically of COVID-19,

we think it's come from some of these wet markets in China.

And for many of us in the West,

we look over there and we say, "Okay, well,

perhaps they should close down."

And to a certain extent that is true.

But we should also look in our own back garden

and just look at how we are treating animals here.

It's not just over there. If we are cooping up

our livestock in unsanitary conditions,

having to give them antibiotics all the time,

we really don't have much of a case to be pointing

the finger at anybody else.

The more I looked into it

and the more research I looked at,

it was sort of like going down the rabbit hole, in a sense.

Animal agriculture is a big business.

It's causing all sorts of major issues,

but nobody's joining the dots.

I worked in the Office

of Counter-terrorism and Emerging Threats

at the Food and Drug Administration.

And, in that office,

we were preparing for things like pandemics,

like COVID-19, that we're facing now.

I worked with the Center for Disease Control.

I worked for the National Institutes of Health.

I worked with the military.

I worked with Homeland Security.

Throughout that entire time, not once

did we ever talk about how these emerging diseases

come about in the first place.

This is the time.

If there is any time, this is the time

to really look into how these infections come about.

So you think about it, we're about

eight billion humans on this planet right now.

But for every human on this planet,

there are about ten land animals

raised and killed for food.

So we think there are too many humans?

Think about how many animals there are.

So we're talking about 80 billion land animals

being raised and killed for food at one time.

You know, with Coronavirus, we are being told to...

To socially distance and rightfully so.

But we're doing the absolute opposite

with these animals in these farms.

We're crowding them into as tight of a space as we can.

And that goes against everything that we know

about how to contain and prevent

the emergence of infectious diseases.

Their immune systems are decreased

because of the stress that they face

and then they're so densely packed.

So, it's so easy for one animal to catch an infection

and then pass it on to another animal

and then the virus can spread like wildfire.

So far, they've been able to verify the deadly strain

of flu virus is passed on from chickens to people.

Four people...

In 1997, with the emergence of H5N1,

it was a highly pathogenic influenza virus

that emerged from chicken farms in China.

Now, that virus had a lethality rate of about 60%.

Think about it. This was a virus that killed

60 out of 100 people who contracted the virus.

You can imagine how deadly that virus is.

I mean, that is a scary, scary virus.

H5N1 came out from animal agriculture

and it is still out there and it is still circulating

and it is still mutating.

We are not done with H5N1.

It's a ticking time bomb,

you know, what's happening in these factory farms

and the influenza strains that are coming out.

It's no coincidence

that when we think of past pandemics,

we think of swine flu and avian flu

and pigs and chickens

are the most intensively farmed animals on the planet.

Intensive farming acts as a crucible

for the development of pathogenic organisms.

It's our insatiable need

for cheap food and for animal protein.

If we didn't have those,

we wouldn't have a lot of the drivers for zoonotic emergence.

So, I'd be driving every day, farm to farm,

and seeing generally similar sort of problems

across the board,

uh, whether that be disease or... or welfare issues.

Um, and these conditions are not...

Not exceptional, not one-offs.

This is really how our meat, dairy and eggs

are produced every day.

We do a lot of unnatural things to animals.

You know, we routinely mutilate young animals.

We cut off teeth, tails, testicles and beaks, horns,

which creates a direct route into the bloodstream

for bacteria, and it's also greatly stressful

and painful, obviously.

We all know dairy cows that are removed

from their mothers almost straightaway.

Chickens don't get any time with their mothers.

Um, and piglets are weaned about three-to four-weeks old.

When you move them into an environment

that's frightening for them, away from their mum

and on a completely different feed,

it's very common to see things like post-weaning salmonella

or E. Coli diarrhea or meningitis.

Generally when there's been an outbreak

of disease that requires my input,

I'll go and take some samples, um.

And I might, you know, swab some tonsils

or nostrils or take some blood from the jugular vein.

And the whole time, I'm kind of leaning down

in front of the nose and mouth of a pig

which might potentially die from something like swine flu

which could potentially pass to me

or, you know, some unnamed disease

which we haven't discovered yet.

The level of ammonia coming from, you know,

tons of waste from these animals,

and the dust that builds up,

everything that those pigs are breathing out,