Switching to vegetarianism will not prevent people from becoming infected from diseases like COVID-19

While the exact origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 is still unclear, epidemiologists are at least certain that it came from animals . This thought came to many Internet users who linked the consumption of animals and the appearance of COVID-19 and other outbreaks of zoonoses. Among them is a vegan influential man, Edinling, whose real name is Ed Winters. In an interview with USA Today, Winters said : “If we had not used animals for food, we would not have created a situation in which many diseases appeared, including the last coronavirus that was transmitted to humans.”

But this statement and others like it do not take into account the complex dynamics of the relationship between humans and animals: humans and animals will always coexist closely one way or another. Cats and dogs live in our homes, we ride horses, pests such as mice and bedbugs invade our living quarters, and wild animals enter our territory, and we enter them.

The best we can do is try to mediate this coexistence to ensure that we do not infect each other, says Gregory Gray, an epidemiologist at Duke University, who first interviewed Popular Science in January about the origin of the COVID virus. -nineteen.

It’s true that if people stopped eating meat, says Gray: “We probably would have less contact with the animals that we raise or stop getting from the wild for food.” Gray believes that eating animals is an “additional factor” in the emergence of new human diseases - and very important.

But “even if we were all really vegans, we would still have contacts with animals that may contain pathogens that are foreign to the human immune system,” he says. "I do not think that this would stop the spread of microorganisms between species."

People have eaten other animals for millennia. Most of the time we ate pets that we bred, and also hunted wild animals. According to The Guardian in a recentThe big problem — why we had such a cascading stream of new diseases in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries — lies in the intensity with which the animals are now bred.

Theoretically, if we all stopped eating animals, the carrier of the disease with which we come in contact with animals for nutrition would disappear. But since eating animals is a global norm and a necessity in many places, it would be illogical to imagine what the world would be like if we were all vegans. Of course, we would not stop having other relationships with animals.

Leaving aside the fact that mass veganism is unlikely to ever happen, there are many things we can do to make animal food safer in terms of disease.

Gray is partDuke University's initiatives to research and develop new and better ways to monitor the emergence of new zoonotic diseases in livestock. Among them is close monitoring of places where people and animals often come in contact to develop new pathogens, says Gray.

Viruses take a lot of time — years, decades, and even more — to adapt to human cells and then be easily transmitted from person to person. Many never overcome this barrier and always rely on the interaction between humans and animals to hit us (for example, Zika virus is transmitted only through a mosquito bite). Some viruses infect humans, but spread in such a way that it is easier to control, unlike an airborne virus such as COVID-19 (such as Ebola.).

The more opportunities a virus has to spread between people, the more likely it is to cause an epidemic. “What we need to do, instead of responding to these troubles, these epidemics, which sometimes become pandemics, we must return and look at what is transmitted to the people of these professions, and anticipate what new viruses we need for careful observation”, - says Gray. The more opportunities a person has for a virus, the more likely they are to cause an epidemic.

This will require a lot of new monitoring infrastructure and a new commitment to prevent future pandemics. But, as the spread of the COVID-19 virus has shown, the world, and in particular the United States, is not yet ready to deal with the pandemic at its source.