Last week, over 200 experts in public health, medicine, environmental science, ethics, and more joined together to call on the next Director General of the World Health Organization to prioritize factory farming. These experts range from Peter Singer to Mark Bittman, Noam Chomsky to Marion Nestle. Even as WHO confronts emerging epidemics, the threat of factory farming looms large on global health. The importance of this threat is illustrated by the variety of expert disciplines arriving at the same conclusion: we must reduce and regulate factory farming.
As the WHO considers this letter, U.S. policymakers should take note: factory farming exerts a large toll on U.S. health. While debates rage around the American Health Care Act, few policymakers consider the impact that high meat consumption and the industrialization of animal farming has on the public. Mitigating this threat is critical to three enormous health and environmental challenges: antibiotic resistance, chronic diseases, and climate change.
