The images presented in the following program are highly sensitive and may be as disturbing to viewers as they are to us.However, we need to show the truth about animal cruelty.Dr. Greger (m): How we treat animals can have global public health implications.
HOST: Halo attentive viewers, and welcome to Animal World, Our Co-Inhabitants. On this episode of the Stop Animal Cruelty series, we feature Dr. Michael Greger an American physician specializing in clinical nutrition who is a vegan, meaning he follows an animal-free diet.
He is also an author and internationally recognized speaker on public health issues. Dr. Greger currently serves as the Director of Public Health and Animal Agriculture at the Humane Society of the United States, a highly respected US animal-welfare organization.
In his most recent book, “Bird Flu: A Virus of Our Own Hatching,” Dr. Greger discusses how consumption of animal products and the widespread inhumane practice of factory farming pose serious threats to global public health.
One of Dr. Greger’s chief concerns is the emergence of new forms of influenza viruses which frequently originate from factory farmed animals who are made to live in utterly appalling conditions.
Dr. Greger (m): The reason that we are so concerned about the emergence of this new bird flu virus,or in fact any new influenza virus, including the swine flu virus, is because the influenza virus has a track history.
Influenza is a virus well-known to humankind, and in fact triggered the worst plague in human history, the flu pandemic of 1918. No war, no famine, no plague ever killed so many people in so short a time as the 1918 pandemic.