On The Origin Of The Home Of COVID-19 - 23

Mother Jones on Eating Habits

The Bulletin of The Atomic Scientists seems like a strange place to bring up what I call "the mass-production-of-animals-for-food industry", but here goes:

"While enteric fermentation (cow burps) explains about 70 percent of total farm-based emissions, most of the increase since 1990 can be explained by the way farms deal with manure. When it’s spread over cropland at reasonable rates, manure makes the soil more fertile without releasing much methane. But when livestock are penned together by the thousands, as they are in the dominant form of US meat production, they generate so much manure that it has to be collected in vast “lagoons.” Farmers then liquify and spread it on fields at high rates—and their operations release methane in the process, the EPA states. As a result, methane emissions from manure leapt by the 68 percent between 1990 and 2019, the finds, citing the shift to ever-larger dairy and hog operations as the main driver."

(Time for a cow tax? Buried in UN report is bad news about climate impact of factory farms, emphasis added). That article quotes from and/or mentions the recent IPCC Report and Mother Jones.

It can be noted that their mass-production also introduces viruses in their products as shown by analysis of sewage systems (Implementation of environmental surveillance for SARS-CoV-2 virus to support public health decisions: Opportunities and challenges).

This Dredd Blog series has set forth a hypothesis asserting that other practices of "the mass-production-of-animals-for-food industry" is contributing to or outright causing the COVID-19 pandemic (On The Origin Of The Home Of COVID-19, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22).

Significant portions of that hypothesis are drawn from another Dredd Blog series concerning viruses (On the Origin of the Genes of Viruses, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16).

The gist of the (host, home) matter is that the genes of viruses are not produced by the virus, rather, each gene of each virus is produced inside a host microbe by the "3D printer" like mechanism called a "ribosome":

Ribosome: a sophisticated molecular machine

"The modern virus needs a host with ribosome molecular machinery in order to reproduce."
 

(On the Origin of the Genes of Viruses - 2). How much have you heard or read about the host microbe (home) that produces the genes of SARS-CoV-2 (which causes COVID-19)?

Let me answer for you: zip, zero, and nada.

That is because it is unlikely that "the mass-production-of-animals-for-food industry" even cares to know the 'home' where the virus and its genes are produced by a host microbe's inner ribosome.

Instead, they are content to machine gun innocent microbes that are doing nothing but processing the food ingested by animals being mass-produced so you and I can eat them:

"Since ribosomes are essential for life, they make attractive targets for antibiotic drugs. Of course, you need to be careful not to attack our own ribosomes, otherwise you would kill yourself along with the infection! Fortunately, bacterial ribosomes have many small differences from our own ribosomes, so there are many antibiotic drugs that specifically attack 70S [microbe] ribosomes. Two examples are included here, and there are many other examples in the PDB. On the left, tetracycline (in red) is bound to the small subunit (1hnw ), blocking the binding of the tRNA. On the right, chloramphenicol (in red) is (1nji ), blocking the reaction that adds amino acids to the growing protein."

(Protein Data Bank, emphasis added; cf. On The Origin Of The Home Of COVID-19).

Likewise, "the mass-production-of-animals-for-food industry" is content to export the 'left over' (offal) to the rest of the world (On The Origin Of The Home Of COVID-19 - 15).

The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.