When Meat Really Is Murder

Swine Flu Outbreak

Mike Davis

THE Mexican swine flu, a genetic chimaera probably conceived in the faecal mire of an industrial pigsty, suddenly threatens to give the whole world a fever. The initial outbreaks across North America reveal an infection already travelling at higher velocity than did the last official pandemic strain, the 1968 Hong Kong flu.

Stealing the limelight from our officially-appointed assassin, H5N1, this porcine virus is a threat of unknown magnitude. It seems less lethal than Sars, but as an influenza it may be more durable. Given domesticated seasonal type-A influenzas kill as many 1 million a year, even a modest increment of virulence, especially if combined with high incidence, could kill as many people as a major war.

Meanwhile, one of its first victims has been the consoling faith, long preached by the World Health Organization (WHO), that pandemics can be contained by the rapid responses of medical bureaucracies, independent of the quality of local public health.

Since the initial H5N1 deaths in Hong Kong in 1997, the WHO, with the support of most national health services, has promoted a strategy focused on the identification and isolation of a pandemic strain within its local radius of outbreak, followed by a thorough dousing of the population with anti-virals and (if available) vaccine.

An army of sceptics has contested this viral counter-insurgency approach, pointing out microbes can now fly around the world (literally, in the case of avian flu) faster than WHO or local officials can react to the original outbreak. They also pointed to the primitive, often non-existent surveillance of the interface between human and animal diseases.

But the mythology of bold, pre-emptive intervention against avian flu has been invaluable to the cause of rich countries, like the United States and Britain, who prefer to invest in their own biological lines of defence rather than dramatically increasing aid to epidemic frontlines overseas, as well as to big pharma, which has battled developing-world demands for the generic, public manufacture of critical antivirals like Roche's Tamiflu.

The swine flu may prove that the WHO/Centers for Disease Control (CDC) version of pandemic preparedness — without massive new investment in surveillance, scientific and regulatory infrastructure, basic public When meat really is murder health, and global access to lifeline drugs — belongs to the same class of Ponzified risk management as Madoff securities. It is not so much that the pandemic warningsystem has failed as it simply doesn't exist,even in North America and the EU.

A decade of urgent warnings by scientists has failed to ensure the transfer of sophisticated viral assay technology to thecountries in the direct path of likely pandemics.Mexico has world-famous diseaseexperts, but it had to send swabs to a lab in Canada order to identify the strain's genome.Almost a week was lost as a consequence.

But no one was less alert than thedisease controllers in Atlanta. Accordingto The Washington Post, the CDC did notlearn about the outbreak until six days after Mexico had begun to impose emergencymeasures. There should be no excuses.

What caused this acceleration of swine flu evolution? Virologists have long believed that the intensive agricultural system of southern China is the principal engine of influenza mutation. But the corporate industrialization of livestock production has broken China's natural monopoly on influenza evolution.

In 1965, for instance, there were 53 million US hogs on more than 1 million farms; today, 65 million hogs are concentrated in 65,000 facilities. This has been a transition from old-fashioned pig pens to vast excremental hells, containing tens of thousands of animals with weakened immune systems suffocating in heat and manure while exchanging pathogens with their fellow inmates.

Any amelioration of this new pathogen ecology would have to confront the monstrous power of livestock conglomerates such as Smithfield Farms (pork and beef) and Tyson (chickens). Last year, a commission convened by the Pew Research Center reported a systemic obstruction of their investigation by corporations, including blatant threats to withhold funding from cooperative researchers.

This is not to say a smoking gun will never be found: There is already talk in the Mexican press about an influenza epicentre around a huge Smithfield subsidiary in Veracruz state. But what matters more is the larger configuration: The WHO's failed pandemic strategy, the further decline of world public health, the stranglehold of big pharma over lifeline medicines, and the planetary catastrophe of industrialised and ecologically-unhinged livestock production. THE GUARDIAN

From TODAY, News – Wednesday, 29-April-2009