Claiming the first life of a Canadian and that of a Costa Rican, swine flu cases also increased globally to 29 countries, with casualties also risen in Mexico.Australia, Norway, Poland, Sweden and the United Kingdom became the latest countries to announce newly confirmed cases, with 8 in the UK alone.

The US Centers for Disease Control has also announced that only about 10 percent of US illnesses have resulted from people traveling to Mexico, reflecting the global trend of the flu spreading within other countries.
Public health ministers for the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) plus China, South Korea and Japan held a meeting in Thailand to discuss collaborative efforts to halt the spread of the flu. 

Supreme Master Television interviewed Robert P. Martin, former Executive Director of the former of the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production, whose task has been to work with agriculture industry representatives, veterinarians, ethicists and politicians to receive suggested solutions for the problems in public health, environment and animal welfare caused by factory farming. 

Supreme Master TV :In the Pew Commission on Industrial Farming, you mentioned that it concluded that factory farms created unacceptable health risks. Would you like to elaborate on that?

Bob Martin – Former executive director of Pew Commission on Industrial Farming (M): Our main concerns on the public health side were a couple of things. Now, viruses and bacterial development are two different things. The routine use of antibiotics is what allows these animals to be housed together, overcrowded in these kind of filthy conditions where they live standing over their own waste.

It suppresses the bacterial infections but that also allows for the environment to be in place for rapid evolution or mutation of viruses. And then another really serious concern we had is that there is just not enough monitoring of workers in these industrial farms.

We really decided that given the structure of these industrial operations and the fact that the workers aren’t being tested, that a viral outbreak flu epidemic like we’ve seen was really a matter of when and not if. I hope that people start looking in this country really at how we produce food because it’s the system itself that is the problem. It’s not the animals in the system, it’s the way we raise the animals that are the problem.

VOICE: Thank you Executive Director Martin and the Pew Commission, for highlighting the significant impact of factory farming operations on public health. We join in sorrow for the most recent loss of life in Canada and Costa Rica as we pray for increasing awareness and adoption of the plant-based lifestyle for global well-being.