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State fairs in the time of bird flu: Here’s why health experts advise caution
Side Effects Public Media | By Benjamin Thorp
Published August 9, 2024 at 11:09 AM CDT
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Between July and October states across the country hold their annual state fairs.
The events are known for things like Ferris wheels and corn dogs, sculptures made entirely from butter and the biggest pig in the state. But state fairs can also be places where it’s easier to spread disease –– bringing humans and animals from farms across the state into close contact.
That’s of particular concern this year, as H5N1 or bird flu infections have been confirmed in dairy cattle in 13 U.S. states for the first time ever. The virus has also infected four dairy workers across Michigan, Texas, and Colorado.
But that’s not keeping many fairgoers from lining up in front of the cattle nosing their way out of their barn fences.
Mel Ventimiglia stood by several cows with his grandkids inside a barn at the Indiana State Fair in Indianapolis. He said bird flu isn’t even on his radar.
“I haven’t heard anybody mention it except for you,” he told Side Effects. “Hopefully, I forget about it pretty quickly.”
At another nearby cattle barn, farmer Randy Mason says he follows basic precautions to keep his cattle from getting sick while at the fair, but he’s not particularly worried.
“A lot of that in my opinion gets overblown,” he said. “They get one or two cases and then it becomes –– like everything the government does –– it becomes overblown and out of proportion.”
But across the country, bird flu infections have been confirmed in nearly 200 herds, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
That’s led officials at some state fairs to enact stricter rules to keep the virus from spreading.
In Minnesota, which has detected cases of bird flu within its dairy cattle, the state is requiring all cows to have a negative bird flu test before coming to the state fair.
That’s not the case in many other states, however, including Indiana, where there hasn’t been confirmed cases of bird flu.
“Since we’ve not had a diagnosis, we’ve not put those additional measures,” said Bret Marsh, Indiana state veterinarian.
He said the state has told farmers to keep an eye out for signs of bird flu in their animals. They have also communicated to farmers the risks of spreading illness when coming to the fair and advised that animals are quarantined for 30 days after being shown –– but without a positive test, Marsh said, the state doesn’t need to put tighter restrictions in place.
Why are state fairs a concern?
But scientists widely agree that there is not enough testing going on to fully understand which states have cows infected with bird flu.
Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, said states like Indiana don’t have any positive bird flu cases in cattle because they aren’t looking for them.
“The assumption should be, this virus is in the state of Indiana, we just haven’t found it yet,” he said. “That’s what they should be messaging, not ‘Our cows are free.’ That’s foolish to believe.”
That makes sites like state fairs –– where humans will be coming into contact with different animals –– especially concerning. Scientists worry that the bird flu could mutate to become a human virus if given the opportunity.
Currently, the virus seems to only have infected humans coming in direct contact with the udders and equipment used on infected cows, and have resulted in cases of conjunctivitis or pink eye in humans. The broader concern is that the virus could mutate into a respiratory virus which would spread more easily from person to person.
And fairs have a history of being places where that spillover –– from animals to humans –– happen.
In 2012 a major swine flu outbreak led to over 300 infections in the U.S., with the majority of those associated with exposure at agricultural fairs. And last year, the CDC reported that two people caught swine flu after visiting pig exhibits.
Each time an influenza virus jumps into a new host it’s given an opportunity to evolve, potentially becoming one that could easily spread through humans.
Experts worry that the risk of H5N1 becoming a human virus could be substantially heightened if the virus makes it to pigs in particular because they are a perfect mixing vessel for viruses from different species. This means that the different viruses can exchange genetic material and learn from one another, potentially mutating and becoming more adept at infecting humans.
“One of the things that people bring up so much about Covid-19 are the animal markets in China, where you have multiple different animals and different species interacting with each other,” Adalja said. “Similar things happen at state fairs in the United States. That’s not really any different.”
Andrew Bowman, professor of veterinary preventive medicine at the Ohio State University, agrees that the co-mingling of animals and people at state fairs poses a risk.
“We’ve thought about new pandemic viruses arising from Southeast Asian live animal markets. And we think, ‘Oh, we would never do that in the U.S.’ Well, fairs kind of mimic that,” he said.
The risk to humans is still low
Still, experts like Bowman say that isn’t a reason to miss out on the state fair altogether.
“I’m still going to the fair, and my family is still going to the fair. I had a milkshake when I was there,” Bowman said.
He added that at-risk populations, such as the immunocompromised, should consider avoiding the cattle barn this year.
“You know, exercise caution and really kind of think about which contacts [you] need to have,” Bowman said. “Can I enjoy the animal exhibits, maybe from a little further distance, and not get right in the middle of it?”
The CDC issued guidance in June for state fairs to reduce the spread of bird flu, including a prohibition on dumping milk on the ground, because raw milk from infected cattle is likely to carry live virus. The guidance also advises keeping cows from different herds apart, and encourages visitors to wash their hands before leaving a barn.
Earlier this year the U.S. Department of Agriculture instituted a rule requiring cows test negative for the virus before crossing state lines.
Still, the risk to humans from the bird flu virus remains low, according to the CDC’s assessment.
Clinicians detail H5N1 infections in 2 Michigan farm workers
A British crocodile expert who admitted in court to filming himself sexually abusing, torturing and killing dozens of dogs will spend the next 10 years incarcerated, according to multiple reports.
Adam Britton, 53, was sentenced to 10 years and five months in Australian prison on Thursday after he pleaded guilty to 56 counts of bestiality and animal cruelty charges, the BBC and NBC News reported. Britton, who was arrested in 2022 in connection with the crimes, also admitted to four counts of accessing child abuse material, according to the outlets.
The Northern Territory Supreme Court heard from prosecutors that Britton filmed himself from November 2020 to April 2022 torturing 42 dogs of varying ages and breeds until the animals almost died, NBC News reported, citing court documents. He then shared the explicit videos online under different pseudonyms.
Britton, who used an Australian online marketplace to secure dogs from owners who had to give their pets away, would abuse the animals in a shipping container on his property that he placed recording equipment inside of, the BBC reported, per court documents. He would call this container the “torture room.”
Once killed, Britton would feed some of the dogs’ remains to crocodiles, according to the BBC, per the court filings.
“I deeply regret the pain and trauma that I caused to innocent animals,” Britton said in a letter dated July 16, per NBC News.
Judge calls Adam Britton’s actions ‘grotesque’
Chief Justice Michael Grant also called Britton’s actions “grotesque,” and said the “unalloyed pleasure” he took in torturing the dogs was “sickeningly evident,” the BBC reported.
The judge confirmed that at least 39 of the dogs were intentionally killed by Britton.
Britton was caught by authorities after he uploaded a clip of him torturing at least eight dogs, which were all puppies except one, according to the BBC. Someone who saw the video passed it on to the Northern Territory Police Force in an anonymous tip. Police in April 2022 seized recording devices, animal remains, weapons and a laptop, which also contained 15 files containing child abuse material.
“[Your] depravity falls entirely outside any ordinary human conception,” Grant said about Britton during his sentencing hearing, per British service broadcaster.
Adam Britton confesses to having a mental disorder
Britton told the court during the sentencing hearing that he was suffering from a mental disorder that caused intense and atypical sexual interests that were harmful to others. He added that he would seek long-term treatment for his issues.
“I now acknowledge that I’ve been fighting a rare paraphilic disorder for much of my life,” he said, per NBC News. “and that shame and fear prevented me from seeking the proper help I needed.”
Before Britton’s crimes were uncovered, he sexually abused his own dogs, Ursa and Bolt, for years, according to NBC News, citing court documents.
“My own dogs are family and I have limits,” he said in a Telegram message cited in the documents. “I only badly mistreat other dogs… I have no emotional bond to them, they are toys pure and simple. And (there are) plenty more where they came from.”
Even growing up in West Yorkshire before he moved to Australia 20 years ago, Britton was harboring a “sadistic sexual interest” in animals, court documents say, per the BBC.
“I was sadistic as a child to animals, but I had repressed it. In the last few years, I let it out again, and now I can’t stop. I don’t want to. :),” he wrote in one message the BBC reported was shared in court.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Adam Britton sentenced for sex crimes involving dogs who were tortured
https://www.yahoo.com/news/british-crocodile-expert-sentenced-sexually-210552339.html
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RFK Jr. admits to dumping a dead bear in Central Park, solving a decade-old mystery
August 5, 202410:16 AM ET
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Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., pictured in May, released a video over the weekend recounting a 2014 incident in which he dumped a dead bear cub in Central Park to make it look like it had been in a bike crash.
Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
For more on the 2024 election, head to the NPR Network’s live updates page.
A decade after the shocking discovery of a bear cub carcass in Manhattan’s Central Park, the mystery of who dumped it there has finally been solved.
And the man taking responsibility is none other than presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
The conspiracy theorist-turned-third-party candidate’s campaign has weathered a series of increasingly improbable-sounding scandals in recent months, from Kennedy’s admission that a worm ate part of his brain to his denial of reports that he once ate barbecued dog (he said it was a goat).
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RFK unleashed this latest one himself, in a three-minute video posted to X (formerly Twitter) on Sunday.
It shows him sitting at a kitchen table, telling an incredulous-looking Roseanne Barr (yes, the canceled comedian) about how the dead bear ended up in his van upstate and, ultimately, on top of a bicycle beneath a bush in New York City’s largest urban park.
Kennedy, an animal lover and former environmental lawyer, says he was driving upstate early one morning to take a group of people falconing in the Hudson Valley when a driver in front of him fatally hit a bear cub.
“So I pulled over and I picked up the bear and put him in the back of my van, because I was gonna skin the bear,” he explains matter-of-factly. “It was in very good condition and I was gonna put the meat in my refrigerator.”
Kennedy added that it is legal in New York State to get a bear tag to take home a roadkill bear. Such a tag must be written up by a law enforcement officer.
The bear never made it back to his Westchester home, however.
Kennedy says he got waylaid by a busy day of falconry, and then had to rush back to New York City for a dinner at Peter Luger Steak House, which ran late.
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“I had to go to the airport, and the bear was in my car, and I didn’t want to leave the bear in the car because that would have been bad,” Kennedy continues.
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Then, as he put it, “the little bit of the redneck in me” had an idea.
Kennedy just happened to have an old bike in his car, which he said someone had asked him to get rid of. He recalled that the city “had just put in the bike lanes” after a number of serious accidents, and decided to stage the bear in Central Park as if it had been hit by a bike.
“I wasn’t drinking, of course, but people were drinking with me who thought this was a good idea,” Kennedy said. “So we went and did that and we thought it would be amusing for whoever found it, or something.”
Florence Slatkin, with her dog Paco, points to the spot where she and a friend discovered a dead bear cub in New York’s Central Park, on Oct. 7, 2014.
Richard Drew/AP
The six-month-old, 44-pound cub made national news after a dog walker stumbled upon it that fateful October morning, in a wide-open part of the park right near the path where thousands of people run and bike each day.
Weirdly enough, one of the New York Times reporters who covered the mystery was Caroline Kennedy’s daughter Tatiana Schlossberg, RJK Jr.’s first cousin once removed. She told the paper this weekend that “like law enforcement, I had no idea who was responsible for this when I wrote the story.”
Law enforcement took the bear to Albany for analysis and determined that it had been hit by a car, likely outside the park. They also confiscated the bicycle to test for fingerprints.
“I was worried because my prints were all over that bike,” Kennedy says in the video, drawing laughs from the room.
But the mystery remained unsolved, and the story eventually faded away. Now, almost 10 years later, Kennedy said he was prompted to come clean ahead of an anticipated New Yorker exposé: “Looking forward to seeing how you spin this one,” he captioned the video.
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“They asked me, the fact checkers, and, you know, it’s gonna be a bad story,” he says with a laugh.
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The New Yorker piece, published online Monday morning, situates the bear anecdote within a larger look at Kennedy’s famously checkered past and motivations for running.
It also includes a photo of Kennedy, who was 60 at the time, posing with his hands inside the bear’s bloody mouth and an exaggerated grimace on his face.
“Maybe that’s where I got my brain worm,” he told the magazine.
Kennedy also made headlines during the Republican National Convention in July after a leaked call with former President Donald Trump captured the Republican nominee criticizing vaccines (a stance for which Kennedy is famous) and appealing to Kennedy with a vague, “I would love for you to do something.”
Kennedy apologized to the president and, seeking to quash speculation, vowed to stay in the race. But he has seen his support dwindle — down to single digits in several national polls — in the weeks since President Biden announced his withdrawal. His fight to get onto state ballots has reportedly been a financial drain, and he’s canceled multiple campaign appearances over the last month.
How Livestock Farming Affects Climate Change, Explained
The environmental impact of raising animals for food.
August 5, 2024 by Sentient Media Leave a Comment
By Seth Millstein, Sentient Media
In the 10,000 years since humans first developed animal agriculture, livestock farming has become central to modern society. Unfortunately, it’s also become one of the biggest drivers of climate change and environmental destruction. Animal farms create a staggering amount of air, water and land pollution, and with the consequences of climate change worsening by the year, addressing the environmental impacts of livestock farming is more important than ever.
Global warming is an enormous part of climate change, but it’s not the only part. The concept of climate change encompasses not only rising global temperatures, but all sorts of other changes to the natural composition of Earth and its atmosphere, such as water pollution and land degradation. Here are some of the ways livestock farming contributes to those changes.
But First, a Brief Summary of Greenhouse Gasses
One of the biggest ways livestock farming contributes to climate change is through the emission of greenhouse gasses, which trap heat in the Earth’s atmosphere and cause global temperatures to rise. Insofar as livestock is concerned, there are three greenhouse gasses in particular of note.
- Carbon dioxide (CO2): The “main” greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide comprises around 80 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions. CO2 exists naturally in the atmosphere and regularly circulates from the Earth to the air as part of the carbon cycle; however, the burning of fossil fuels and other human activities releases additional CO2, throwing off that cycle and increasing global temperatures. CO2 can stay in the atmosphere for hundreds of years.
- Methane (CH4): Methane only accounts for 11 percent of global greenhouse emissions, and unlike CO2, disappears after a relatively brief 12 years. However, it’s much more effective at trapping heat in the atmosphere: over a 100-year period, one pound of CH4 has 28 times the global warming potential as one pound of CO2.
- Nitrous oxide (N2O): Nitrous oxide only makes up six percent of greenhouse gas emissions, and exists naturally on Earth as part of the nitrogen cycle. It remains in the atmosphere for about 121 years on average after it’s emitted, and its global warming potential is a whopping 265 times greater than that of CO2 over a 100-year period.
Because there are multiple greenhouse gasses with different warming potentials, greenhouse emissions are commonly converted to and measured in CO2-equivalents, or CO2-eq.
In various ways and to varying degrees, livestock farming emits all of the aforementioned greenhouse gasses. Here’s how.
How Livestock Farming Creates Methane Emissions
Livestock are a significant source of methane emissions, thanks to a natural biological process called enteric fermentation. Cows, sheep, goats and other ruminant livestock have microbes in their digestive systems that decompose and ferment the food they eat, and methane is a byproduct of this fermentation process.
That methane is released into the atmosphere when the animals burp or fart, and it’s also contained in their urine and manure. One cow can produce up to 264 pounds of methane every year, and it’s estimated that in total, enteric fermentation from ruminant livestock is responsible for 30 percent of global anthropogenic methane emissions.
How Livestock Farming Leads to Pollution from Manure
Farm animals produce around 450 million tons of manure every year, and figuring out what to do with it is a major challenge for livestock farmers. Some farms store manure in large piles, landfills or lagoons — known as “settlement ponds” — while others simply dump it onto cropland and use it as untreated fertilizer.
All of these management methods result in the release of methane and nitrous oxide, which manure also contains. When manure is stored in an environment with insufficient oxygen, as is often the case with landfills and lagoons, it undergoes a process known as anaerobic decay, and releases nitrous oxide and methane into the air as a result. In addition, structural failures or extreme weather events often cause the manure in settlement ponds to leak into nearby soil and waterways.
When manure is used as fertilizer, it releases nitrogen into the soil. That’s the point of fertilizer, as plants need a certain amount of nitrogen to grow. But when farms use this type of fertilization as a disposal method for excess manure, they often over-apply it to the crops in question, which causes the soil to absorb more nitrogen than is necessary.
You might wonder why it matters if soil contains too much nitrogen. There are two intertwined reasons: nutrient runoff and soil erosion.
Nutrient Runoff
Nutrient runoff occurs when rain, wind or other environmental forces disrupt soil and carry it into nearby waterways. When that soil has been fertilized with untreated manure, it pollutes the water in question, both with nitrogen and other toxins that are common in manure, like phosphorus. Nitrogen and phosphorus both stimulate algae growth, and excessive algae growth in a body of water leads to harmful algal blooms.
As their name implies, harmful algal blooms have a host of damaging environmental consequences. They release toxins that kill aquatic life and poison the drinking water, which can cause serious illness and even death in humans. Algal blooms reduce the amount of dissolved oxygen in the water, which aquatic life relies on, and prevent light from penetrating the water’s surface, thus choking the life out of coral reefs and other aquatic plants that are crucial to Earth’s ecosystems.
Soil Erosion
Nutrient runoff is exacerbated by another consequence of livestock farming: soil erosion. This is when topsoil particles become loosened and detached, which diminishes the quality of the soil and makes it much more susceptible to nutrient runoff.
A degree of soil erosion occurs naturally, but livestock farming greatly accelerates it in a few ways. One is overgrazing, which is when livestock graze on pastures for extended periods without the pastures being given time to recover. The hooves of cows, goats and other ruminant livestock can erode the soil as well, especially when many of them are grazing in one place.
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In addition to making nutrient runoff more likely, eroded soil is less fertile and can support fewer forms of plant life. It is also worse at retaining water, which can increase the risk of drought.
Deforestation Due to Livestock Farming
It’s impossible to assess the environmental impacts of livestock farming without also discussing deforestation — the practice of permanently clearing out trees from forested land and repurposing the land for other uses. Humans deforest around 10 million hectares of land every year, and 41 percent of tropical deforestation is carried out to make way for cattle pastures.
Deforestation is a monumentally damaging practice, and exacerbates all of the aforementioned impacts of livestock farming: greenhouse emissions, nutrient runoff and soil erosion.
Greenhouse Emissions Caused by Deforestation
When forested land is cut down, greenhouse emissions increase in two ways — one temporary, one permanent.
Trees absorb and store carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, which makes them an indispensable resource for reducing global temperatures. When they’re cut down, however, all of that carbon dioxide is released back into the air. What’s more, the absence of trees in a previously forested area means that, for an indefinite period of time, any atmospheric carbon dioxide that would otherwise have been sequestered by the trees remains in the atmosphere instead.
The greenhouse gasses emitted during livestock-driven deforestation, combined with the gasses emitted by livestock farms themselves, account for 11-20 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. In the Amazon, which has traditionally been one of the world’s largest sequesterers of carbon, so much land has been deforested that the rainforest is in danger of becoming a net emitter of carbon instead.
Soil Erosion and Nutrient Runoff Caused by Deforestation
In forested land, trees play an important role in protecting and preserving the soil. The canopy they provide protects the soil from the sun and rain, while the trees’ roots help hold the soil in place.
Needless to say, clearing all of the trees in a forested area means that the soil doesn’t get any of these benefits. As a result, the soil becomes eroded even before any livestock might step foot on it, which in turn increases the likelihood of nutrient runoff and water pollution.
The Bottom Line
The environmental impact of livestock farming can’t be ignored. The sector’s contribution to deforestation, habitat loss and pollution of all kinds significantly exacerbates climate change. Absent a significant reduction in global meat consumption, it will continue to present a formidable challenge to the long-term health of Earth and its many inhabitants.
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This article originally appeared in Sentient at https://sentientmedia.org/how-does-livestock-affect-climate-change/.
Exposing the Big Game 