Close slaughterhouses until workers can be tested, appeals PETA India
The group has also appealed to the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India to make daily COVID-19 testing of workers a mandatory part of slaughterhouse registration.
The body notes that “slaughterhouses around the world are hotbeds of COVID-19 infections, since maintaining the recommended social distancing among workers is nearly impossible inside them. Recent figures show that in the US, 15,000 slaughterhouse and meat-processing plant employees have COVID-19 and at least 60 workers have died. It was also recently reported that in Europe, more than 1,000 slaughterhouses employees have COVID-19. As the number of cases increases in these facilities, the workers spread the disease to their families and in their communities.”
Keeping this in mind, PETA India has also asked for the permanent closure of all unlicensed slaughterhouses.
The group pointed out that many slaughterhouses in India lack suitable basic facilities, such as ample water, proper cleaning supplies, adequate drainage, and effective waste disposal. Staff spend their days surrounded by blood, faeces, urine, and associated pathogens, often without wearing shoes or any protective gear.
“If COVID-19 spreads like wildfire through blood-soaked slaughterhouses, as it has in other countries, workers will become major transmitters of the disease to their families and communities. No one should be in a filthy slaughterhouse right now – not the workers or the terrified animals whose throats are slit for meat that nobody needs,” observes PETA India Vegan Outreach Coordinator Dr Kiran Ahuja.<br> <br>Since COVID-19 is overwhelmingly believed by scientists to have jumped from animals to humans at a live-animal market in China – along with previous infectious diseases like SARS, swine flu, and bird flu also traced back to animals used for meat – the animal-rights body said slaughterhouse workers are already at risk for zoonotic diseases (illnesses of animal origin) like brucellosis, leptospirosis, and Q fever.
(Siddhi Jain can be contacted at siddhi.j@ians.in)
–IANS<br>sj/tb/sdr/
