The farm animals has lead the born of different viruses. Farm grow these viruses in different times. The largest German meat fridge, Tönnies , came to break the peace that Merkel had achieved in her German flock. The lady even allowed herself to lecture on how infections develop, while (almost) everyone fell apart due to the coronavirus.
His conservative government – we are not going to forget now the boot that he imposed to crush the plebiscite of autonomy for the debt of Greece, exactly 5 years ago, nor the role that Angela Merkel had in the tricorn of power when the European continent collapsed with the debts in 2008-, he launched a series of quasi-socialist rescue and social aid programs, with so many euros followed by zeros that it is impossible to give it dimension.
Compared to the 30,000 deaths in France, 35,000 in Italy, 10,000 in Belgium, 29,000 in Spain, 45,000 in Great Britain, 6,100 in the Netherlands and 5,300 in Sweden, all countries with 16 to 70 million fewer inhabitants than Germany, ‘la Merkel ‘literally became the statesman who is going to withdraw from politics as a heroine.
And the party was ruined because when everything was almost dominated, in the city of Gütersloh, over 7,000 workers at the refrigerator, more than 2,000 tested positive for Covid-19, and had to quarantine half a million people . There are 5 in a critical situation, admitted to intensive care.
What went wrong?
Did the German health authorities do something wrong in the pandemic? With high probability the answer is no. 9,100 deaths is a very low number, compared to any country. At the outbreak of the coronavirus crisis, they had 450,000 hospital beds, of which 28,000 were Intensive Care, with tens of thousands of respirators available.
What is wrong is the system: even in Germany (why not in Germany?) The living and working conditions of slaughterhouse, hatchery and refrigerator workers are poor, or lousy.
Both in that refrigerator and in many others, immigrants work. These usually live in narrow accommodations provided by the company. Journalist Lavinia Pitu of the Deutsche Welle managed to interview a worker, under anonymity.
“They forced us to work up to 12 or 13 hours, instead of eight, but then the overtime pay didn’t appear.”
“Inside the fridge it is very cold and wet, the conveyor belts move very fast, the hands at night were swollen.”
” There were state inspections but they were pre-warned, and at that time the speed of the conveyor belts slowed down to a normal rate.”
“Most of us don’t speak German. We were subcontracted by Romanians, or in any case our foreman was Romanian, who translated and shouted. “
“They offered accommodation, but in an apartment there could be up to 10 or 14 people, at the rate of 200 euros each , ” he said.
What did the manager of the Tönnies say ? That the culprits for breaking this supposed perfect world that the pandemic had solved were the workers, the majority immigrants from Eastern Europe ( Romanians who in their country of origin could earn between 285 and 495 euros a month, or Bulgarians who in their country could earn between 310 and 500 euros a month, or Poles who in their country would earn no more than 170 to 400 euros a month). Those immigrants, during the parenthesis of the pandemic, went to their places of origin … and brought evil . He didn’t exactly say it that way, but he did, and he had to apologize in public. Greens leader Anton Hofreiter he snapped, “If you really want to apologize, pay the costs of closing the fridge – and wages – out of your own pocket, not from the corporation’s coffers.”
Hubertus Heil, the Merkel government’s Social Democratic Labor Minister told Bild multimedia: ” The exploitation of people from Central and Eastern Europe is becoming a risk to general health, and the meat industry has to change absolutely .”
Everything seems to indicate that the cost of production (wages and living conditions) are low, to keep prices more or less accessible to the German public.
Did the German health authorities do something wrong in the pandemic? With high probability the answer is no. 9,100 deaths is a very low number, compared to any country. At the outbreak of the coronavirus crisis, they had 450,000 hospital beds, of which 28,000 were Intensive Care, with tens of thousands of respirators available.
What is wrong is the system: even in Germany (why not in Germany?) The living and working conditions of slaughterhouse, hatchery and refrigerator workers are poor, or lousy.
Both in that refrigerator and in many others, immigrants work. These usually live in narrow accommodations provided by the company. Journalist Lavinia Pitu of the Deutsche Welle managed to interview a worker, under anonymity.
“They forced us to work up to 12 or 13 hours, instead of eight, but then the overtime pay didn’t appear.”
“Inside the fridge it is very cold and wet, the conveyor belts move very fast, the hands at night were swollen.”
” There were state inspections but they were pre-warned, and at that time the speed of the conveyor belts slowed down to a normal rate.”
“Most of us don’t speak German. We were subcontracted by Romanians, or in any case our foreman was Romanian, who translated and shouted. “
“They offered accommodation, but in an apartment there could be up to 10 or 14 people, at the rate of 200 euros each , ” he said.
What did the manager of the Tönnies say ? That the culprits for breaking this supposed perfect world that the pandemic had solved were the workers, the majority immigrants from Eastern Europe ( Romanians who in their country of origin could earn between 285 and 495 euros a month, or Bulgarians who in their country could earn between 310 and 500 euros a month, or Poles who in their country would earn no more than 170 to 400 euros a month). Those immigrants, during the parenthesis of the pandemic, went to their places of origin … and brought evil . He didn’t exactly say it that way, but he did, and he had to apologize in public. Greens leader Anton Hofreiter he snapped, “If you really want to apologize, pay the costs of closing the fridge – and wages – out of your own pocket, not from the corporation’s coffers.”
Hubertus Heil, the Merkel government’s Social Democratic Labor Minister told Bild multimedia: ” The exploitation of people from Central and Eastern Europe is becoming a risk to general health, and the meat industry has to change absolutely .”
Everything seems to indicate that the cost of production (wages and living conditions) are low, to keep prices more or less accessible to the German public.
The virus did not start in Wuhan
However, the GRAIN group, which works on biodiversity issues, surveys good agricultural practices and supports small farmers, states in a magnificent material published in June 2020, that for various reasons it was not disclosed, reproduced and debated (will it affect Is it something to the Argentine-Brazilian agro-industrial complex?), that the latest research ” suggests that industrial farms, and not fresh produce markets, could be the origin of the Covid-19 “. We are going to transcribe some lines of the document (available at www.grain.org/article/6438-nuevas-investigaciones-sugieren-que- ):
In a study published on May 25 (1) by scientists from China and the United States, it was also concluded that the virus did not originate from the Huanan market. Like other recent scientific studies (2), which analyzed the initial virus samples collected in China, it was detected that various types of the virus had been circulating in China for a time, and that the initial transmission from animals to humans occurred prior to the outbreak. from the Huanan market. The type of virus that infected people in the Huanan market was a transmissible type that most likely evolved in humans, from an initial type that sprang from animals. How that initial jump occurred is still a mystery.
“ This is a virus of animal origin that made a leap, perhaps from bats to humans, perhaps through… another animal, perhaps through livestock. And we still don’t have data to know where and how it happened, ”said Colin Carson, a professor at Georgetown University, in an interview with LiveScience (3). ” As a scientist studying zoonoses, I haven’t seen anything that makes me think that the [Huanan] market is a possible option .”
Studies of wild and domestic animals in China, and animal susceptibility studies to Covid-19, have not indicated any obvious candidate that may have acted as an intermediate host between bats and humans, which many scientists believe was necessarily a step in the evolution of the virus. Pigs would be an important species to investigate. As a consequence, two studies, in which pigs (4) underwent doses of Sars-Cov-2, found that they were not infected with the disease. These studies must be taken with caution, as they were not performed with the initial type of disease that sprang from animals to humans. Pigs and other animal species, raised intensively in China, should continue to be investigated.
We remain convinced that factory farms need to be considered as one of the primary sources for the emergence of new and dangerous pathogens, including the coronavirus, alongside deforestation (5) and our increasing invasion of bat and other habitats. wild animals. These threats are highlighted in a recent publication of a scientific study (6), which provides a 3-year update on the appearance of new enteric coronaviruses, in pigs in China (known as SeACoV). One of these, known as SADS, is mentioned in our recent report on African Swine Fever (7). The authors found that there were several outbreaks of the new SeACov virus on pig factory farms during that period and that multiple types of the virus were likely involved. They warn that the circulation of these viruses, which likely evolve through transmission between bats and pigs (and possibly rats), is a significant risk for the emergence of new pandemic coronaviruses in humans.
But little attention has been paid to a few other animals on this list, which more clearly meet the ” high population density ” criterion , which favors genetic mutations. Pigs would be obvious candidates on this list, for various reasons. On the one hand, pigs and humans have very similar immune systems, which facilitates the crossing of the virus between the two species, as happened with the Nipah virus outbreak in Malaysia in 1998 (8). Just three years before the Covid-19 outbreak began, tens of thousands of pigs from four Qingyuan County factory farms in Guangdong, less than 100 km from where the SARS outbreak originated in 2003, died cause of an outbreak of a novel lethal coronavirus strain (SADS) that was found to be 98 percent identical to a coronavirus found in horseshoe bats in a nearby cave (9). Fortunately, transmission to humans did not occur, but subsequent laboratory tests demonstrated that such transmission could have been possible (10).
These factory farms are the ideal breeding ground (11) for new pathogens to evolve
Hubei factory pig farms are still reeling from the massive outbreak of African swine fever that affected the province and other parts of China just over a year ago (12), and which decimated the country’s stocks by half. Under these conditions, it is entirely possible that the outbreak of a new coronavirus among the pigs of the province will go unnoticed. GRAIN, other organizations, and several scientists have been warning about this situation for more than a decade: the industrialization and corporate consolidation of meat production generate greater risks for the appearance of global pandemics such as the Covid-19 (13 ). Governments and large meat companies completely belittle this reality. As evolutionary biologist Rob Wallace noted, “Anyone trying to understand why viruses are becoming more dangerous must investigate the industrial model in agriculture and, more specifically, in livestock production ”(14).
In order not to lower the adrenaline (and the panic and / or boredom that the world population already has), a study by the University of Agriculture of China, led by the scientist Liu Jinhua, set off an alarm in the future. Future that in these times accelerates to the speed of light. There is a new strain of swine flu, with the potential to infect humans.
The Virus of the Virus
This is a long-range study: 30,000 samples were taken from the airways of pigs in 10 different provinces of China, in the period from 2011 to 2018. And in this way they found 179 different swine flu viruses. One of them is the G4.
As they explained (the review of the scientific paper was done by the magazine of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States (in the original Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America -PNAS), “it is a unique combination of three lineages Among which is the H1N1 strain, which is precisely the cause of the avian influenza pandemic of 2009, which mutated humans from pigs “… and at this point many people heard that against this flu, humans do not have immunity .
The Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention was categorical: work would have to start on a vaccine against the G4 virus for both pigs and humans. This appearance, published on Monday, June 29 in various media, requires a rereading of the document published by GRAIN, where the debate focuses on the way food is produced industrially.
The Federation of Argentine Regional Refrigeration Industries (FIFRA) groups around 350 refrigerators and slaughterhouses in Santa Fe, Córdoba and Entre Ríos. Those three provinces, in addition to that of Buenos Aires and other satellite poles such as Salta, concentrate most of the slaughter and meat supply for the domestic market and exports.
Coronavirus in refrigerators in Argentina
The head of FIFRA, Daniel Urcía, declared that “ since before March 20, having knowledge of what was happening in China, with whom there is fluid contact because they are buyers of Argentine meat, it was decided to work a training with infectious diseases of the National University of Córdoba, and establish sanitary protocols to be implemented in all plants. There were some problems during the pandemic, but the vast majority have had no problems and are operational. ”
According to Urcía, early on they adopted the temperature taking at the entrance, the restriction on access to the property and the plant, and ” accept SENASA Resolution No. 346 whereby if faced with a suspected case or confirmed contagion, work is suspended and you cannot return until SENASA defines it ”
Among the cases that were most disclosed, the Frigorífico Bermejo de Salta, the Santa Giulia in the town of Alejandro Korn in the Buenos Aires suburbs, the Friar in Nelson, Santa Fe province, El Federal de Quilmes (where a worker died on 22 April), the Maneca, in the town of Tigre, in which there were two cases that forced the temporary closure of the firm, and the Subpga, in Berazategui.
Of all of them, the two most notorious cases are the Santa Giulia , in which this July 1 the workers will cut the route demanding effective compliance with sanitary measures, and the Black Bamboo , in the city of Hughes, in the south of the province of Santa Fe.
About the latter, Daniel Urcía commented “ in that refrigerator, which works hard in exports, two cases were confirmed on June 19. SENASA disabled the activity, and 25 resumed, although 30 employees remain in quarantine. The contagion came from a carrier who had traveled to Buenos Aires. Of the 600 employees, 500 are at their jobs, and the sanitary measures proposed by the Federation in March are being complied with . ”
