Eating Habits and Viral Infections

What is it about?

Viruses, the living dead, are the greatest villains in a “no man’s land”. For millions of years, we have been at war with these zombie particles along with other pathogens. Viruses have extraordinary abilities to mutate, changing their genes and thereby jumping the species barrier to expand their range of victims. Although numerous diseases are transmitted to humans from other animals, none are transmitted from plants or fungi. Eating habits of humans have not only caused preventable epidemics, they have also caused an array of ailments in many of our bodily organs. Over 75% of emerging infectious diseases are zoonotic (Taylor et al., 2001). Moreover, environmental sustainability can be achieved in part through eating plants instead of animals, thereby preserving the planet as well as our feelings of well-being. The 2002 epidemic of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), caused by SARS-CoV, first in China, and later throughout the world, resulted in numerous fatalities. The virus was traced to a palm civet (Panguma larvata), a raccoon dog (Nyctereutes procyonoides), a Chinese ferret-badger (Melogale moschata), and humans working in a live animal market in the Shenzen municipality of China (Guan et.al., 2003; Webster, 2004). There is little doubt that the virus jumped from other animals to humans; these animals served as a significant source of nutrition for the local population. A novel corona virus named Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) appeared in Saudi Arabia in 2012, with a higher fatality rate than SARS. Humans were believed to have been infected from bats, a reservoir for many viruses, through an intermediate host, which in the case of MERS, was likely to be the camel. The current COVID-19 pandemic is caused by SARS-CoV-2, very similar to SARS-CoV, and it also had an animal origin, likely a bat that transferred to intermediate animals like pangolins, and then to humans working in an animal market in Wuhan province of China in or around December, 2019 (Alnemare, 2020). Fruit bats are reservoirs of Ebola, a highly transmissible virus that causes fatal infections in humans and nonhuman primates. Human infections are believed to have occurred while hunting and preparing ‘bush meat’, or via contact with bodily fluids from an infected animal or person. Another deadly virus related to Ebola that causes hemorrhagic fever, is Marburg virus; it persists in fruit bats that infect nonhuman primates, and humans have acquired the virus through contact with and/or ingestion of the meat from one or more wild animal(s) (Kadanali & Karagoz, 2015). Human Immunodeficiency viruses (HIV-1 & HIV-2) are known to have been transmitted across the species from other primates, as a result of chimps being killed and eaten as bush meat, and through cuts and wounds on the skins of the hunted and the hunter, or subsequent to the killing event. Its zoonosis, the adaptive hurdles to cross-species transmission, and broad implications of HIV infection and dissemination have been reviewed (Khan & Geiger, 2021). Many strains of influenza viruses are known to aggressively infect a large array of animal species, including humans, various avian species, canine, feline, and even marine species. Avian influenza viruses are known to infect many species of birds. In pigs, different strains of flu viruses are known to swap their genetic materials, creating dangerous, more virulent and novel new strains, often with broader ranges of infect-able animals. Millions of people around the globe have been killed by influenza since the “Spanish flu” pandemic of 1918 (Webster, 2004). Prion diseases are rare zoonotic, transmissible, fatal neurodegenerative disorders, also known as transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (TSE). These diseases affect humans and animals, including scrapie (in sheep), chronic wasting disease (CWD, in deer and elk), bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, in cattle) and Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease (CJD, in humans) (Gallardo & Delgado, 2021). A variant of CJD, commonly known as ‘mad cow disease’, is caused by consumption of contaminated meat and other food products derived from affected cattle. These and many other pathological conditions caused by biological infectious agents (viruses, bacteria, protozoa, fungi, prions, etc.) can be transmitted from any of a variety of animals to humans, giving rise to varied types of infectious diseases that can be avoided by merely minimizing or eliminating exposure to and consumption of animal products. This knowledge can protect us from a plethora of zoonotic diseases, rendering the human population healthier and happier.

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Why is it important?

This article is especially important these days because it sheds light on how the COVID-19 pandemic, along with many other well-known viruses, have resulted from the eating habits of humans. The details contained here are a call for fundamental change in how and what we eat in order to prevent these types of viral outbreaks from occurring, as well as promote a sustainable global environment.

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