The wellness industry is killing animals, spreading disease, and fueling the next pandemic
Raw pet food is contributing to the spread of H5N1 bird flu, especially in cats
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Note: this piece I wrote was originally published in STAT NEWS on April 10, 2025.
The $6.3 trillion wellness industry thrives on distrust of science, glorifying “natural” alternatives, and fear-based marketing.
The result? Pseudoscience that’s not just harming human health. It’s killing animals, too, specifically via H5N1 bird flu.
Holistic pet health influencers, organic farmers, and alternative medicine advocates embrace behaviors that increase the risk of viral transmission, paving the way for a potential human pandemic. It’s already killed pets. And now, with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s virtual erasure of the FDA’s Center for Veterinary Medicine, the very department tasked with overseeing, monitoring, and responding to the ongoing H5N1 outbreak, it will most certainly worsen.
Wellness misinformation isn’t just rampant in human health — it’s deeply embedded in veterinary health, too.
And there are even fewer guardrails in place to combat it than there are in human medicine. The veterinary wellness industry is growing rapidly, with raw pet food alone estimated to double its global market value from $7.39 billion in 2024 to $14.5 billion by 2030.
For years, the raw pet food industry has capitalized on the same anti-science rhetoric that fuels vaccine denial and chemophobia. They claim raw diets are “ancestral” and “biologically appropriate,” despite overwhelming veterinary and epidemiological data showing that raw diets increase the risk of bacterial and viral infections — without offering any health benefits.
And those infections can include H5N1. The highly pathogenic avian influenza has long been deadly for birds. In the past two years, it has spread into other species: seals, foxes, cats, cows, and more. The more this virus moves through mammals, the more chances there are to mutate, adapt, and potentially jump to humans.
H5N1 has been detected in poultry, dairy cattle, and raw milk, which means pet food made from these sources and left uncooked can carry live H5N1 virus, along with a myriad of other pathogens and parasites. Yet pet food companies continue to mislead pet owners into thinking raw diets are safe.
Cats are particularly susceptible to infection with H5N1 through ingestion too, as their gastrointestinal tracts contain high levels of the receptors that H5N1 binds (α2,3-linked sialic acid receptors). In 2024, indoor pet cats in California died after being fed raw pet food infected with H5N1. Other pet cats died after eating raw poultry products contaminated with H5N1, sold by a pet food company. The H5N1 mortality rates in infected cats can be upward of 50%.
Read more, below:
The death of a domestic cat from bird flu is a reminder: raw pet diets are not safe.
As a scientist — one that specializes in immunology and infectious disease — and a cat mom to 7 rescues (all formerly strays or abandoned), I will say this unequivocally: pet owners who deliberately put animals in harms’ way are committing animal abuse.
Yet instead of deferring to veterinary, scientific, and public health experts, wellness influencers are pushing anti-science attitudes and misinformation that accelerates the virus’s spread.
Cooking meat and pasteurizing dairy effectively inactivate influenza viruses, but raw foods allow virus to survive and spread through the food supply, pet and human alike.
Contrary to claims of wellness influencers, the alternative preservation methods they tout, like high pressure processing (HPP) and freezing, do not render flu viruses inert. Holistic pet influencers push “natural immunity” to H5N1 and “cures” that don’t work. And organic farming groups resist culling of infected flocks and reject livestock vaccination programs, allowing the virus to spread.
Does this sound familiar? It’s the same anti-vaccine, anti-public health mindset that fueled Covid-19 misinformation, that’s currently fueling measles misinformation — and with this, it’s also enabling a virus with known pandemic potential.
This isn’t just an animal health crisis — it’s a risk to public health.
When animals consume foods containing live virus, they can get infected but also shed virus into the environment, which allows H5N1 to survive, spread, and replicate among more animals — potentially making the jump to humans easier.Influenza A viruses like H5N1 have segmented genomes, which means they can exchange entire pieces of their genetic material within a host and become an entirely new virus. Every time H5N1 infects a new species, there’s a potential opportunity to mutate into a strain that can spread to humans.
This isn’t just theoretical. The 2009 H1N1 pandemic occurred when a new influenza virus jumped species.
The wellness industry doesn’t spread misinformation by accident — it’s their business model.
It convinces people that “mainstream” medicine, veterinary science, and public health experts are untrustworthy. It manufactures fear of “toxins,” “Big Pharma,” and “Big Pet Food,” then sells alternative solutions — raw diets, homeopathic remedies, and “natural” immune boosters — that have no scientific basis.
The claims aren’t supported by data. There is no evidence that raw diets provide health benefits to pets — but overwhelming evidence that they increase the risk of infections and illness. There is no evidence that “natural immunity” can protect against H5N1 — but plenty of evidence that the virus has a 50% mortality rate in infected cats. There is no evidence that raw milk is superior to pasteurized milk — but abundant evidence that raw dairy spreads deadly pathogens.
We can’t allow pseudoscience to dictate pet health and public health policy.
We need to focus on evidence-based disease control at a time when the health of humans, our pets, and the planet are threatened. That means more regulatory oversight, policies that control zoonotic diseases, and infrastructure for disease control. Kennedy’s dismantling of critical health agency departments is the opposite of what is needed.
The FDA’s Center for Veterinary Medicine monitors zoonotic diseases like H5N1, regulates pet food safety, and responds to veterinary public health crises, but it was hit hard by recent layoffs. That needs to be reversed. In addition to fully staffing the center, we need laws and oversight on raw pet food manufacturing and distribution. That includes mandatory pathogen testing, clear labeling, and enforceable safety standards to prevent the spread of infectious diseases through the pet food supply chain. We need science-driven animal health policies, including vaccination of domestic poultry and other animals, and culling protocols to prevent unchecked spread of H5N1. These are the proven interventions to contain H5N1 prevent cross-species transmission, and reduce the risk of a human pandemic.
RFK Jr.’s proposal of letting H5N1 spread unchecked through birds will have the opposite effect.
Pasteurization requirements and food safety laws must be strengthened — raw milk and dairy is a known vector for many viral and bacterial pathogens, including H5N1. We need to expand food inspection budgets, not cut them. We need accurate public health communication at the national and state level to combat pseudoscience and food safety misinformation at a time when social media influencers are allowed to say anything without any repercussions.
The real threat isn’t just the virus, it’s the anti-science movement enabling its spread. We’ve repeatedly seen how pseudoscience kills through history.
The only question now isn’t if the wellness industry will help fuel the next pandemic — it’s when.
And with RFK Jr. gutting our critical science and health agencies, that “when” may come a lot sooner than we think.
Now, more than ever, we all must join in the fight for science.
Thank you for supporting evidence-based science communication. With outbreaks of preventable diseases, refusal of evidence-based medical interventions, propagation of pseudoscience by prominent public “personalities”, it’s needed now more than ever.
More science education, less disinformation.
- Andrea
ImmunoLogic is written by Dr. Andrea Love, PhD - immunologist and microbiologist. She works full-time in life sciences biotech and has had a lifelong passion for closing the science literacy gap and combating pseudoscience and health misinformation as far back as her childhood. This newsletter and her science communication on her social media pages are born from that passion. Follow on Instagram, Threads, Twitter, and Facebook, or support the newsletter by subscribing below:
I admit to some guilt here as I bought raw food for my IBS-afflicted kittycat. I didn't do it because it was raw, but because it was a novel protein (rabbit). He was since put on a steroid by his vet so that food was no longer required.
I continue to be appalled by the ignorance of this regime. Every new day brings a fresh new horror. (In mental health, we are profoundly concerned about the proposed “autism registry.”) I’m grateful for real scientists like you!