The next global pandemic could come from the United States.
That’s the sobering message of a report from Harvard Law School and New York University, examining how humans, livestock and wild animals interact here.
Many familiar ‒ and terrifying diseases ‒ originated in animals, including HIV/AIDS, Ebola, Zika, pandemic flu and COVID-19. Some started in other countries, typically on the African or Asian continents. These so-called zoonotic diseases are often blamed on poor hygiene, lack of government oversight or unsafe practices in those places.
While Americans often think “it couldn’t happen here,” regulations are so loose and interactions so frequent, researchers found, that a virus or another contagious bug could easily jump from animals to people in the U.S., sparking a deadly outbreak.
“There really is this false sense of security and unfounded belief that zoonotic disease is something that happens elsewhere,” said Ann Linder, one of the report’s lead authors and associate director of policy and research with the Brooks McCormick Jr. Animal Law & Policy Program at Harvard Law School. “In fact, I think we’re more vulnerable than ever in many ways.”
The report, also led by NYU’s Center for Environmental and Animal Protection, highlights several areas of vulnerability, including commercial farms where millions of livestock come into close contact with each other and their handlers; the wild animal trade in which animals are imported with few or no health checks; and the fur trade in which minks and other animals are bred for their coats, with little safety oversight.
“Through globalization, we’ve erased seas and mountains and other natural boundaries of disease,” said Linder, an expert in law and animal policy. “We’re mixing animals and pathogens across different continents and circulating at a dizzying and ever-increasing pace.”
About 10 billion land animals are raised in the U.S., a number which is increasing by about 200 million a year, according to the report. Pigs and poultry, for instance, are raised in higher numbers in the United States than almost anywhere else in the world, the report found, and are the most likely vectors for a particularly lethal outbreak of the flu.
Industry representatives were quick to defend the safety of their practices.
“According the CDC, the likelihood of spreading an avian disease to a human in the United States is extremely rare,” Ashley Peterson, National Chicken Council senior vice president of scientific and regulatory affairs, said in an emailed statement.
A pork industry group did not immediately return a request for comment.
Workers on pig and poultry farms are particularly vulnerable, because of a lack of regulations protecting them, said Delcianna Winders, an associate professor of law and director of the Animal Law and Policy Institute at Vermont Law and Graduate School in Royalton.
“There is virtually no regulation of on-farm raising of animals. There’s limited regulation of the slaughterhouse but it is extremely inadequate and it’s getting worse,” said Winders, who was not involved in the report, but researches a similar area. “Right now, the federal government is deregulating slaughter, rather than increasing oversight.”
Because the mink and larger fur industry does not produce food, it is even less regulated, Linder said.
A different study publishedthis week in “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,” found “that mink, more so than any other farmed species, pose a risk for the emergence of future disease outbreaks and the evolution of future pandemics.” Other studies have shown that mink are susceptible to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, and outbreaks were detected on 18 American mink farms during the pandemic’s first two years. At least four Americans, two of whom worked on mink farms, were believed to have been infected by the animals.
Challis Hobbs, Executive Director of the Fur Commission USA, a trade group, said “we unequivocally assert our commitment to the health and safety of our animals, our workforce, and the communities in which we operate.”
The industry, working with the federal government and state agencies, vaccinated 95% of the U.S. mink population beginning summer 2021, he said. The cost was entirely covered by the mink farmers, who also are helping to fund a SARS-CoV-2 surveillance project on mink farms.
“Despite claims from animal rights advocates,” he said, “there is no significant threat to the general public from U.S. farmed mink.
About 220 million live wild animals are imported in the United States every year for pets and other purposes, many without health or safety checks, Linder said.
If someone wants to bring a dog or cat into this country, there’s a process, Linder said. “But if I’m a wildlife importer and I want to bring in 100 wild mammals from South America, I can do that with very little regulation of any kind.”
Perhaps the earliest Ebola case, which sparked the outbreak in West Africa from 2013 to 2016, was blamed on bush meat. It’s illegal to import bush meat to the United States, but it’s not illegal to import the same live animals that bush meat comes from, she said. “There are wide gaps.”
Both Linder and Winders also highlighted the lack of industry transparency.
“So much of this is hidden from public view,” Winders said. “There’s so much we don’t know because we’re not monitoring.”
Winders said she’s concerned about how much money the government spends subsidizing and protecting industries she believes put the American public at risk. She hopes Congress will take advantage of this year’s reenactment of the Farm Bill to limit subsidies and impose new safety regulations on animal industries.
“Don’t we see the writing on the wall?” Winders asked. “Scientists are telling us there’s a looming threat of a zoonotic outbreak that could make COVID look like a cakewalk, and we’re still just ignoring it, even after what we’ve gone through over the last couple of years.”
Contact Karen Weintraub at kweintraub@usatoday.com and Adrianna Rodriguez at arodriguez@usatoday.com.
Health and patient safety coverage at USA TODAY is made possible in part by a grant from the Masimo Foundation for Ethics, Innovation and Competition in Healthcare. The Masimo Foundation does not provide editorial input.
