Students may reconsider buying their next chicken sandwich after hearing a lecture on bird flu Thursday night.

“However cheap the chicken, it may not be worth the risk,” said Dr. Michael Greger.

In a lecture sponsored by the Vegetarian and Vegan Club, Greger talked about the dangers of bird flu, calling it the next pandemic. Dr. Greger is the Director of Public Health and Animal Agriculture at the Humane Society of the United States.

Animals are being raised in ways not before seen. Factory farms – large farms with thousands of animals crammed together in warehouses – are perfect for the spread of diseases like bird flu, Greger said.

“We’re changing the way animals live, contributing to new diseases,” Greger said. “[Disease] starts out harmless [and] turns deadly. That’s what these conditions do. This is not the way animals were supposed to live.”

Greger traced the history of diseases humans have contracted from animals, connecting them to the start of large-scale domestication and the conditions of animals, including diseases such as measles, smallpox, typhoid, the common cold and influenza.

People have been domesticating animals for thousands of years, Greger said, but only recently have people been keeping them in factory farms instead of in fields, pens and backyards, in order to support a higher demand for protein.

“Old MacDonald had a farm, [but it] got replaced by new McDonald’s farm,” Greger said. “Never once has a deadly, dangerous virus emerged in chickens kept outdoors.”

These crowded conditions have helped lead to the mutation and spread of a disease that emerged from the intestines of ducks, Greger said. The duck droppings spread to confined chickens, where the virus had to evolve to live in a different environment. It started to infect the chickens’ lungs, allowing the virus to become airborne. When the chickens are packed together, it can easily jump from chicken to chicken. Now it is starting to spread to humans.

To date, bird flu has only killed a few hundred people while AIDS and other diseases are infecting many more. Greger said the reason so many people are concerned about the issue is because this has happened before. In 1918, there was an influenza outbreak that killed millions.

“A similar virus today can kill more,” Greger said. “There is only one virus on this planet that is capable of infecting billions and that is influenza.”

Bird flu also has a much higher mortality rate than the previous outbreak. The influenza of 1918 had a mortality rate of around 2.5 percent. Greger said bird flu has a mortality rate of around 60 percent.

The Vegetarian & Vegan Club sponsored the event to raise awareness about vegetarianism, said Gaurav Pranami, graduate student in chemical and biological engineering and treasurer of the Vegetarian & Vegan Club. There are many reasons to go vegan, Pranami said, listing health reasons, environmental reasons and ethical reasons. The lecture addressed the health aspect.

“There are so many problems that arise out of factory farming. The way it is done now isn’t right,” Pranami said. “Millions of lives are too much of a price to pay for cheap chickens.”