Avian Flu: It's Your Fault

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has launched a new campaign: Avian Flu: It's Your Fault. The website text begins:

If you haven’t gone vegetarian yet, you need to read this now. When we asked nicely, you didn’t listen. We spent years exposing the cruelty of factory farms and the dangers of eating fat-, cholesterol- and drug-laden animal flesh. We appealed to your sense of compassion, but you didn’t care enough to make the switch to a cruelty-free diet. And most of you ignored the warnings about animal-borne diseases such as mad cow and SARS.

Now we face a new threat, avian flu, which seems likely to make mad cow and SARS look like a head cold. The World Health Organisation (WHO) warns that the deadly H5N1 virus that causes “bird flu” is in danger of mutating into a form that will spread easily from person to person. If this happens, humans will have no immunity to the new bug, and we will face a global pandemic that could kill more than 7 million people. This is a conservative estimate. Other experts fear the number of dead could be as many as a billion.

I agree with PETA that factory farming contributes to disease (although doesn't bird flu arise in rural areas?), but I think this campaign is in poor taste and beyond satire.