Possibly true. However there must have originally been some transfer from pigs to humans. Eating pigs and keeping them as livestock almost certainly contributed to the disease occurring. It is too late to stop this one but what about the next one. Anyone care to dispute the notion that the risk of these diseases 'crossing over' would be much reduced if humanity was vegetarian?

Anyone care to dispute the notion that the risk of getting run over by a bus would be much reduced if you never left the house?

Not to mention that livestock-spread diseases are just a drop in the bucket in the grand scheme of horrible ways to die via epidemic.

If all of humanity was vegan, the risk would probably be greatly reduced, since no one would have any livestock. Vegetarian diets still include eggs and dairy.

But it's just a completely unhelpful comment. Humanity as a whole is not going to go vegetarian, let alone vegan. Proposing it as a solution is just pushing an agenda.

Partially agreed about the vegan part. I wasn't trying to get too technical. However disease transmission mostly seems to occur via eating meat rather than milk or eggs.

I do think it is entirely practical and possible that that most of humanity could go vegan some time in the future. Reducing the risk of disease is just one of many reasons why it would improve the world. If it is an economically superior solution then eventually that is the way the world is likely to head.

How's this for a more incrementally useful statement? Reductions in livestock and meat consumption would be likely to reduce the incidences of these type of diseases - therefore it is something we should look to minimise. It isn't an all or nothing proposition.

I got the impression that in this cases, the disease isn't spread through eating pigs. Rather, it's the fact that pigs and humans are living in close proximity to each other that allowed a flu strain to evolve that targeted both species. Hence my comment about livestock.

I'm seeing a lot of contradictory indications in the news. 'China bans pork from US/Mexico', reports that 'properly cooked' pork is fine.

You would think the original mutation could easily have happened in circumstances that are different from the current means of transmission.

Either way it is a pretty safe bet the original pig wasn't being kept as a pet or for milk or eggs.

It has nothing to do with ego; I am a vegetarian. The "solution" is probably what we're doing, that is, being able to produce vaccines quickly.

The calorie density of vegetarian food being what it is, it's probable that if all of humanity went vegetarian, it would solve the over-population problem pretty quickly too because we'd run out of food.

You have this completely wrong. It takes about 10 times the plant calories to produce meat calories. If the world stopped eating meat we would would be able to feed many more people.

The bigger issue with veganism (and to a lesser extent vegetarianism) is that it requires cleverness to avoid malnutrition. Like it or not, the human colon is too short for a generic vegan diet; we evolved to eat meat.

There are people who already have issues getting enough iron and protein. This problem would only be exacerbated by a pure vegetarian diet.

Furthermore, we do not have an issue producing food for people. We have an issue convincing people to produce food for people. That is, most of the people who starve do so because they cannot afford food, rather than because food is too expensive. This is not a problem of too little food production, because farmers can barely support themselves in places.

This is not to say that reducing meat consumption is not a bad thing, just that it would probably not solve all the worlds problems (or even the food-related ones).

> The bigger issue with veganism (and to a lesser extent vegetarianism) is that it requires cleverness to avoid malnutrition.

On balance I think it takes less cleverness to be a healthy vegetarian than it does than a healthy meat eater. I'm not a vegan so I can't comment in detail but if the misconceptions about vegetarianism are anything to go by I'd say the difficulties are pretty much all BS. And of course if society was vegan it would be trivial to find all the foods you needed regularly cause they'd be everywhere.

> Like it or not, the human colon is too short for a generic vegan diet; we evolved to eat meat.

The opposite argument actually works better. Could humans live on a 'generic' carnivore diet? It is just as easy to argue that we evolved to eat plants.

But if course that isn't how evolution works. We didn't 'evolve' to do anything but to further our genes. We didn't evolve to drive cars or use computers but here we are. Maybe we evolved to die early so there would be more food for our grandchildren. Evolution can be a rough guide but now we have science which favours a plant diet.

> There are people who already have issues getting enough iron and protein. This problem would only be exacerbated by a pure vegetarian diet.

People who are on the edge of starvation will benefit from any extra source of calories or nutrition. In the long term though the most efficient way to provide this would be via plants or perhaps even artificial means in some cases.

> Furthermore, we do not have an issue producing food for people.

Fair point. However the cheaper it is to produce food the more likely it will find it's way to the poorest of people.

Think about how much food a cow eats in the 2-3 years before it gets turned into burgers.