Know Your Zoonoses

Zoonotic diseases are diseases that spread from animals to humans. Most recently, Covid-19 has joined this growing list, having jumped from bats or other wild animals, to humans, leading to the current pandemic. Zoonotic diseases are emerging with increasing frequency: three out of every four new ones come from animals.
There are over 200 zoonotic diseases, and 56 of them affect 2.5 billion people and cause nearly three million deaths every year. To put these figures into perspective: in 2017, traffic accidents caused 1.24 million deaths, and diabetes caused 1.37 million deaths globally. Covid-19 has caused a huge number of deaths across the globe and has focused the world’s attention on how our mistreatment of wild and farmed animals has resulted in dire consequences to our health. Yet, much of the media’s focus has been on the effects of Covid-19, and not the causes.
We have literally eaten our way to zoonoses. Today, livestock accounts for 60% of all mammal biomass on the planet, while poultry accounts for 70% of bird biomass. Genetically modified to grow massively large while still babies, animals are confined by the thousands in cramped cages, fed GMO corn and soy, and injected with medically important antibiotics to keep them alive just long enough to kill them. Suffering from respiratory disease and impaired immune systems, they are the perfect incubators for pathogens to mutate and spill over to humans. In factory farms, we are creating monster zoonotic viruses that threaten our very survival.
This isn’t our first pandemic, and it won’t be our last. COVID-19 and other pandemics are caused by animal agriculture and our reckless exploitation of the natural world. Not only might future outbreaks be more dangerous, experts agree that they are also expected to become more frequent. The potential causes behind this alarming forecast are human-made, and the most central human activities in this context are all related to our global food system.
In order to educate the public about this important issue, artist Karen Fiorito (under Got Drought?) designed a “Know Your Zoonoses” billboard which was installed at 10 locations across the Eagle Rock neighborhood of Los Angeles from April 19, 2021 to May 16, 2021. These billboards were made possible by a grant from the Puffin Foundation and information supplied by the UK vegan charity Viva!