A scientist has warned about an apocalyptic bird flu that could wipe half of humanity, stating that it could be 100 times worse than the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.
According to Dr. Michael Gregor, the virus could emerge from overcrowded and unsanitary chicken farms.
The coronavirus has claimed over 365,000 lives, and Dr. Michael Gregor in his new book, “How to Survive a Pandemic,” writes that
“In the ‘hurricane scale’ of epidemics, COVID-19, with a death rate of around half of one percent, rates a measly Category Two, possibly a Three. … The Big One, the typhoon to end all typhoons, will be 100 times worse when it comes, a Category Five producing a fatality rate of one in two. … Civilization as we know it would cease.”
“With pandemics explosively spreading a virus from human to human, it’s never a matter of if, but when.”
Citing the bird-based Spanish Flu outbreak of 1920, and the H5N1 outbreak in Hong Kong in 1997, Gregor writes, “the worry is that the virus never stands still but is always mutating. … This is the monster lurking in the undergrowth, the one that makes epidemiologists shudder.”More in Home
The Hong Kong outbreak, which originated in a bird market, “started with a three-year-old boy in Hong Kong, whose sore throat and tummy ache turned into a disease that curdled his blood and killed him within a week from acute respiratory and organ failure.” While only 18 people contracted that flu – a third of them died.
During that pandemic, the government killed 1.3 million chickens in an attempt to eliminate the virus – but there have since been two more outbreaks between 2003 and 2009 outside of China.
The scientist writes that we have to change the entire system – away from large scale farms where chickens are fed antibiotics and are crammed together and pass diseases from one to another easily to smaller, free-range farms … and eventually not eating chickens or ducks at all.
