Can You Get Sick From What Someone Else Eats?

I often write about the health ills of eating meat, eggs, and dairy products--cancer, heart disease, diabetes, obesity, and so forth. But, as this NYT article shows, you don’t even have to eat animal products to get sick because of them. Pollution and waste runoff from factory farms can sicken anyone. 

According to the article, one cow produces as much waste as 18 people. In one Wisconsin town, more than 100 wells were polluted by agricultural runoff within a few months. Parasites and bacteria from animal waste seeped into the town's drinking water, and residents suffered from chronic diarrhea, stomach illnesses, and ear infections. One woman’s 5-year-old son required an operation because of the ear infections, which were most likely caused by bathing in water polluted with E. coli bacteria.

This can happen to anyone--it doesn’t matter if you’re a vegan, vegetarian, flexitarian, fruitarian, or full-fledged meat-eater. That’s why it irritates me when people act as if their food choices don’t concern anyone else. That’s not quite true. Factory farms not only help foster diseases like swine flu, they also pollute our shared environment and sicken people living nearby.   

A Scripps Howard synopsis of a Senate Agricultural Committee report on farm pollution said this about animal waste: “[I]t’s untreated and unsanitary, bubbling with chemicals and diseased. … It goes onto the soil and into the water that many people will, ultimately, bathe in and wash their clothes with and drink. It is poisoning rivers and killing fish and making people sick. … Catastrophic cases of pollution, sickness, and death are occurring in areas where livestock operations are concentrated. … Every place where the animal factories have located, neighbors have complained of falling sick.”

A Duke University Medical Center study showed that people living downwind of pig farms are more likely to suffer from tension, depression, fatigue, nausea, vomiting, headaches, shallow breathing, coughing, sleep disturbances, and loss of appetite.

It's not entirely the farms' fault though. I mean, if billions of people insist on eating animal products, there have to be facilities to raise and kill billions of animals. No one wants factory farms and slaughterhouse in their community, yet plenty of people want the products they churn out. This comes with waste and pollution too.

It’s just another reason to consider going vegan, as far as I’m concerned. Meat, eggs, and dairy products just aren’t worth so much sickness and suffering.