Whether the spread of bird flu to dairy cows, pigs, cats, dogs and seals or the spread of COVID-19 to deer, minks and zoo animals, the press is often mum about zoonotic viruses when they jump species.

Who, for example, knows that Ebola can spread to dogs, pigs and antelopes? Is non-reporting of virus activity to forestall panic or protect commercial markets?

The spread of animal viruses is caused by domestication, warfare, travel, agriculture habitat fragmentation, urbanization and industrialization, say researchers from the Netherlands. MERS, Ebola, SARS, COVID-18 and even HIV all originated from animals before jumping to humans, say researchers in the journal Genetics and Molecular Biology. Have people forgotten the 1918 Spanish flu began as a bird virus?

Many disturbing zoonotic mutations are downplayed or ignored by the mainstream press.

• In early 2021, the USDA found as much as a third of tested white-tailed deer in Illinois, Michigan, New York and Pennsylvania harbored COVID antibodies; one deer may have given the disease to a human.
• In 2019, Food Safety News noted that there have been at least four cases of CJD, a terminal prion-driven brain disease linked to chronic wasting disease in deer.
• A disease ecologist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies observes that as many as 500 animal species share a version of the ACE2 receptor that facilitates COVID cell entry, including many primates, bats, foxes and hyenas.
• The porcine epidemic diarrhea virus (PEDV), a coronavirus, killed millions of U.S. pigs in 2013 to 2014 but was barely reported. Its early Italy invasion in 2016 casts serious doubts about the origin of COVID-19 and its timing.
• African Swine Fever had killed a quarter of the world’s pigs by 2019 but was barely reported by a food-funded press. A scourge in China, ASF is thought to have led to a company in the country buying the Smithfield slaughterhouse in Tar Heel, North Carolina, the largest slaughterhouse in the world, in 2013 to ensure a safe, imported pork supply.

Who remembers the spillover concept?

It is too bad that the memories of “lab leak” and gain-of-function theorists don’t go back as far as the chilling 2012 bestseller, Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic. In that book, award-winning science journalist David Quammen wrote, “In some zoonotic pathogens, efficient transmissibility among humans seems to be inherent from the start, a sort of accidental preadaptedness for spreading through the human population.”

His example? SARS-CoV, the predecessor to COVID-19. Quammen and the scientists who contributed to Spillover were so convinced of an imminent zoonotic pandemic, they abbreviated it NBO, the Next Big One. Did anyone listen?

Here is what Quammen presciently wrote in his book, adapted in Popular Science.

“Over the last half dozen years, I have asked eminent disease scientists and public-health officials, including some of the world’s experts on Ebola, on SARS, on bat-borne viruses, on HIV-1 and HIV-2, and on viral evolution, the same two-part question: Will a new disease emerge, in the near future, sufficiently virulent and transmissible to cause a pandemic capable of killing tens of millions of people? And if so, what does it look like and from where does it come? Their answers to the first part have ranged from maybe to probably. Their answers to the second have focused on zoonoses, particularly RNA viruses.”

CAFOs (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations), wet markets, bush meat and poaching all abet zoonotic viruses, but the suppression of related public health reporting is probably courtesy of news outlet advertisers who are mostly food sellers.

Martha Rosenberg is an investigative reporter whose work has appeared in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), Consumer Reports, Public Citizen, the Center for Health Journalism at USC Annenberg, the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University, and other outlets. She studied at Rush Medical School and writes on health care, food, medicine, and public policy.

Rosenberg’s reporting has been cited by Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Mayo Clinic Proceedings, Public Library of Science Biology, ScienceDirect, the Journal of Pain & Palliative Care Pharmacotherapy, the Journal of Trauma & Dissociation, Britannica, National Geographic, Hastings Law Journal, and Wikipedia. She is the author of several books, including Multidisciplinary Management of Chronic Pain: A Practical Guide for Clinicians, Born With a Junk Food Deficiency, Big Food, Big Pharma, Big Lies, and Food, Clothes, Men, Gas and Other Problems. She publishes on Substack, OpEdNews, and her Amazon author page.