London, May 22 (IANS): The UK needs to drastically cut back its meat intake to avoid a future global health crisis, a group of doctors have warned.
Plant Based Health Professionals (PBHP) said that the connection between major disease outbreaks and factory farming is being "swept under the carpet" amid the coronavirus pandemic, as they join a wave of experts urging people to go vegan, the Metro newspaper reported.
The vast majority of new infectious diseases that have appeared in humans over the past century have been caused by tampering with farmed animals and their habitats, including Swine Flu (pigs), Avian Flu (birds) and Spanish Flu (poultry).
Speaking to the Metro newspaper, PBHP founder and Consultant Haematologist at King's College Hospital, Shireen Kassam, said that another disease outbreak was "inevitable if we do not move towards a plant-based diet".
In the UK, demand for cheap meat has fuelled a huge expansion of factory farming – a controversial process that often sees thousands of animals being packed into small, unsanitary cages.
This "provides the perfect conditions for the generation of novel infections with epidemic and pandemic potential" as well as necessitating the widespread use of antibiotics in animals, "contributing to a crisis in antibiotic resistance among humans", Kassam said.
"The last 100 years has shown that pandemics will continue unless we change the way we eat and how our food is produced.
"Disease is spread predominantly through confinement, we don't have the land capacity to feed the 8 billion people on this planet free range.
"We are in this race to find an antiviral, but other than HIV, there are very few viruses where there are very effective drugs available. (A vaccine) isn't just going to save our problems, there is a risk of a mutation that could come back in a few years.
"We need to learn from our mistakes. We need to change our land use to grow beans and legumes, we need a system change," she told the newspaper.
Poor diets are the main cause of chronic health conditions in adults in the UK, while pre-existing health conditions such as obesity and diabetes are seen as risk factors in catching COVID-19, which has infected 252,246 peopled and killed 36,124 in the country so far.
Research from the University of Oxford last year found foods with the largest negative environmental impacts such as unprocessed and processed red meat, were linked with the largest increases in disease risk, while foods associated with improved health (whole grain cereals, fruits, vegetables, legumes, nuts and some vegetable oils high in unsaturated fats, such as olive oil) have among the lowest environmental impacts.