Time reported that for centuries, the Guangdong province of China has had the world's largest concentration of humans, pigs and fowl living in close proximity.
This environment allowed deadly gene swapping to occur with pigs becoming co-infected with both human and bird strains of influenza.
Theses farming practices have created lethal viral strains that are running rampant throughout the Chinese poultry industry. These strains can combine with human strains and create new mutated flu viruses capable of infecting and killing people on a global scale.
According to China's equivalent of the Centres for Disease Control, the first people to succumb to the SARS virus were bird vendors and chefs who had been in close and continued contact with chickens, ducks and other birds.
The World Health Organization has called SARS a global epidemic but the SARS virus is just one of the many tragedies that has been traced back to factory farming.
The single worst epidemic in recorded world history, the 1918 influenza pandemic was caused by an unnatural density and proximity of ducks and pigs being raised for slaughter. Betwenn 20 to 40 million people across the world died.
In 1957 the raising of pigs and poultry resulted in millions of deaths from the Asian flu. In 1968 millions more died from the Hongkong flu and in 1977 millions died from the swine flu.
In 1999, a new virus, now known as the Nipah virus, jumped from pigs to humans in Malaysia, infecting pig breeders and killing about a hundred people before it was contained.
All of these influenza strains seem to have arisen in the same region of southern China where intensive systems of animal agriculture occur.
It seems the only way to stop the spread of these killer viruses is to move away from intensive animal agriculture and towards a more sustainable plant-based method of production.
The concentration of animals with weakened immune systems in unsanitary conditions seems inherent to factory farming and as these practices continue to spread worldwide, so does potentially lethal viral breeding grounds.
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