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An animal-borne disease upended the whole world in 2020. An El Paso congresswoman’s new bipartisan bill would help protect us from another pandemic and keep diseased meat off your plate.
Diseased farmed animals in the food supply put us at risk for pandemics and national economic losses, but a bill introduced by an El Paso congresswoman offers new protection we need.
The animal agriculture industry regularly slaughters “downed” pigs—factory-farmed pigs who are too weak, sick, or injured to stand on their own—for human consumption. Each year, about half a million arrive at U.S. slaughterhouses. As these pigs await slaughter, they often lie in fecal waste, which increases their likelihood of exposure to disease. Many pigs in our food supply are infected with H1N1 (swine flu), Salmonella, and antibiotic-resistant Campylobacter.
There’s no way to scan a store shelf and tell which pork products came from downed pigs. But why should these animals be in line to become our food in the first place?
That’s why I’m calling on Texans to support the Pigs and Public Health Act (PPHA), introduced by Rep. Veronica Escobar, who represents Texas’s 16th congressional district in El Paso, with a bipartisan group of congress members (a welcome change). The PPHA includes provisions to eliminate downed pigs from the food system—for their benefit and ours—and establishes a hotline for agricultural workers to report public health violations to the USDA and Department of Justice.
This important piece of legislation also leads the charge in promoting the transparency of our food system by requiring annual reporting of the complaints delivered through the hotline while ensuring the safety of the whistleblowers brave enough to come forward. The factory-farming model is successful only because actions are carried out behind closed doors. The PPHA addresses this and would enable Americans to better understand where exactly their food comes from.
The USDA knows that downed animals make for dangerous food and regulates accordingly—sometimes. The department’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) named health concerns the primary reason for removing downed cows from the food supply 20 years ago, but it has refused to implement the same rules for downed pigs.
The PPHA represents an urgently needed turning point in food safety oversight. Industry regulators responsible for consumer safety have yet to take the threat of downed pigs seriously. The current FSIS undersecretary testified in Congress that he would remove downed pigs from the food supply only when they posed a danger equivalent to that of “mad cow” disease.
But with COVID-19 lingering globally, H5N1 (bird flu) possibly becoming endemic in North America, and—alarmingly—African swine flu gaining momentum in China and Southeast Asia, this era of sweeping zoonotic diseases is not the time for “wait and see” regulatory inaction.
We know that viruses can leap from pigs to humans with lethal consequences. Within a year of the first human case of swine flu in 2009, the illness killed more than 18,000 people. Last August, Harvard and New York University released findings on the threat of disease specifically from animal markets. They warn of a “quiet consensus” among scientists that “the next pandemic may be far worse [than COVID-19] and might happen sooner than we think.”
Last June, a coalition of dozens of nonprofits, farmer organizations, and veterinarians led by Mercy For Animals, an organization with more than 8,000 members in Texas, called on President Biden to require regulations for downed pigs. Since then, the situation has only grown more dire. African swine fever has had a devastating economic impact in China, while avian influenza has ravaged farms across the United States. Just this month, the virus appeared not only in farmed birds but in cows at dairies and in their milk. Bird flu outbreaks in U.S. farms in recent years have led to the on-farm killing of tens of millions of birds and billions of dollars in losses.
Last December, before introducing the PPHA, Representative Escobar sent a bipartisan letter to the USDA and FSIS on this topic, but to her knowledge, it received no formal public response. Luckily for us, she decided to take up this urgent health threat in Congress.
The PPHA is comprehensive in setting new standards for food safety at all three stages of pig production: at the farm, during transport to slaughter, and in the slaughterhouse. The FSIS and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would be required to report on the public health impact of pathogens associated with downed pigs.
The USDA should support the PPHA’s mission. The USDA’s collaborative “One Health” approach fact sheet opens with a key argument for regulating downed pigs: “The health of animals, people and the environment are inextricably linked.” I couldn’t agree more. As the FSIS pats itself on the back for its accomplishments in protecting public health, removing the serious threat of downed pigs should be at the forefront of its efforts.
Now is the time for the U.S. government to address regulations for downed pigs, before another animal-borne disease outbreak. Despite the FSIS’s congressional testimony, the USDA should not wait until an outbreak like mad cow disease to take action to protect suffering pigs and the public.
Urge your representatives to support the Pigs and Public Health Act to help get its provisions into the upcoming Farm Bill to help countless farmed animals and protect Americans against animal-borne diseases. We all recognize the wisdom of removing downed cows from our nation’s food supply decades ago. Now we must urge Congress to enact the same sensible regulations for downed pigs.
Katy Fendrich-Turner, MPA, is a long-time Texas resident. She grew up in Houston, attended Vanderbilt University, and now lives in Central Texas with her husband and senior rescue dog. Severely sickened by COVID 19 twice, Katy realizes how seriously the government must take public health threats to protect us Texans and Americans nationwide.