In developing countries, infectious diseases like visceral gout (kidney failure leading to poor appetite and uric acid build up on organs), coccidiosis (parasitic disease causing diarrhoea and vomiting), and colibacillosis (E. coli infection) are common.
I don’t think visceral gout is an infectious disease. I also don’t think chickens can vomit. Two inaccuracies in this one sentence just made me wonder if there were other inaccuracies in the article as well (though I appreciate how deeply researched this is and how much work went into writing it).
Thank you so much for spotting this! It seems like both your points are correct.
To explain where these mistakes came from:
I think visceral gout can be caused by infectious disease, but it can also be caused by other factors, such as poor nutrition (see, e.g. this post from a hen breeding company), so it’s not correct to classify as an infectious disease. The referenced article in footnote 13 investigated the frequency of various diseases in chicken farms in Bangladesh, and found that visceral gout was the most common identified disease (but they correctly do not say it was the most common identified infectious disease).
Vomiting is a symptom of coccidiosis in other animals, (e.g. dogs) but as you say, not in chickens; chickens cannot vomit. I must have looked up the symptoms independently from the frequency data.
I couldn’t find any previous collation of evidence about how animals are treated that I trusted, so this took a lot of research. (Most claims on this topic on the internet are unreferenced claims on websites with a clear agenda: either animal advocacy or the farming industry.) As a result, I don’t doubt there are further mistakes in that section, but hopefully none that detract from the underlying point.
(I no longer work at 80,000 Hours but I’ll ask them to fix this on the website.)
I don’t think visceral gout is an infectious disease. I also don’t think chickens can vomit. Two inaccuracies in this one sentence just made me wonder if there were other inaccuracies in the article as well (though I appreciate how deeply researched this is and how much work went into writing it).
Thank you so much for spotting this! It seems like both your points are correct.
To explain where these mistakes came from:
I think visceral gout can be caused by infectious disease, but it can also be caused by other factors, such as poor nutrition (see, e.g. this post from a hen breeding company), so it’s not correct to classify as an infectious disease. The referenced article in footnote 13 investigated the frequency of various diseases in chicken farms in Bangladesh, and found that visceral gout was the most common identified disease (but they correctly do not say it was the most common identified infectious disease).
Vomiting is a symptom of coccidiosis in other animals, (e.g. dogs) but as you say, not in chickens; chickens cannot vomit. I must have looked up the symptoms independently from the frequency data.
I couldn’t find any previous collation of evidence about how animals are treated that I trusted, so this took a lot of research. (Most claims on this topic on the internet are unreferenced claims on websites with a clear agenda: either animal advocacy or the farming industry.) As a result, I don’t doubt there are further mistakes in that section, but hopefully none that detract from the underlying point.
(I no longer work at 80,000 Hours but I’ll ask them to fix this on the website.)