In reply to veteye:
Welcome to the Pandemic Age. With the way we have structured our food industry and our incessant 'need' for meat almost every day of the week it's just waiting for the next big one - which could make Covid look like a common cold.
God forbid bacteria find a way around the last few antibiotics we have left, that's going to be fun. Also partly thanks to the meat-industrial complex.
I live in Holland and we currently have a big problem with nitrogen and methane depositions mostly caused by industrial-scale cattle farming pretty much making all other economic activity impossible due to environmental consequences and European agreements. I get that it sucks to be a farmer in such times but the arguments raised by the agricultural lobby are mind-numbing at times. Cows (and to a lesser extend other cattle) are notoriously inefficient when it comes to calorie production and they still have the audacity to claim that they are feeding the world. They are completely locked in to an economy of scale that's no longer sustainable. It's the worst when they claim that nitrogen deposition is a good thing because plants need nitrogen to grow. Yes, to a certain extent that's true but it's like telling someone they can become healthy on MacDonalds because the body needs fat, sugar and salt to survive.
In all honesty I'm not vegan or even fully vegetarian put we have been drastically cutting back our meat consumption over the last few years and it's much easier than I originally thought it would be. As a species, we have to do the same in order to keep our world liveable and stand a fighting chance to evade the next zoonotic pandemic.