JuliaB
04-28-2009, 01:36 PM
THE SWINE FLU CRISIS LAYS BARE THE MEAT INDUSTRY'S MONSTROUS POWER
By Mike Davis
AlterNet
April 28, 2009
The Swine Flu Crisis Lays Bare the Meat Industry's Monstrous Power | Health and Wellness | AlterNet (https://www.alternet.org/healthwellness/138798/the_swine_flu_crisis_lays_bare)
_the_meat_industry%27s_monstrous_power/?page=entire
Animal husbandry now more closely resembles the petrochemical industry than the happy family farm.
The Mexican swine flu, a genetic chimera 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 in 2003, but as an influenza it may be more durable than Sars. Given
that domesticated seasonal type-A influenzas kill as many one million people a year, even a modest increment of virulence, especially if combined with high incidence, could produce carnage equivalent to a major war.
Meanwhile, one of its first victims has been the consoling faith, long
preached by the World Health Organisation, 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 antivirals and (if available) vaccine.
An army of sceptics has contested this viral counter-insurgency approach,
pointing out that microbes can now fly around the world (quite 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, preemptive (and cheap) intervention against avian flu has been invaluable to the cause of rich countries, like the US and UK, who
prefer to invest in their own biological Maginot lines 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/Centres for Disease Control version of pandemic preparedness -- without massive new investment in surveillance, scientific and regulatory infrastructure, basic public 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 warning system has failed as it simply doesn't exist, even in North America and the EU.
Perhaps it is not surprising that Mexico lacks both capacity and political
will to monitor livestock diseases, but the situation is hardly better north
of the border, where surveillance is a failed patchwork of state
jurisdictions, and corporate livestock producers treat health regulations
with the same contempt with which they deal with workers and animals.
Similarly, a decade of urgent warnings by scientists has failed to ensure
the transfer of sophisticated viral assay technology to the countries in the
direct path of likely pandemics. Mexico has world-famous disease experts,
but it had to send swabs to a Winnipeg lab in order to ID the strain's
genome. Almost a week was lost as a consequence.
But no one was less alert than the disease controllers in Atlanta. According
to the Washington Post, the CDC did not learn about the outbreak until six
days after Mexico had begun to impose emergency measures. There should be no excuses. The paradox of this swine flu panic is that, while totally
unexpected, it was accurately predicted. Six years ago, Science dedicated a major story to evidence that "after years of stability, the North American
swine flu virus has jumped onto an evolutionary fasttrack."
Since its identification during the Great Depression, H1N1 swine flu had
only drifted slightly from its original genome. Then in 1998 a highly
pathogenic strain began to decimate sows on a farm in North Carolina and
new, more virulent versions began to appear almost yearly, including a
variant of H1N1 that contained the internal genes of H3N2 (the other type-A flu circulating among humans).
Researchers interviewed by Science worried that one of these hybrids might become a human flu (both the 1957 and 1968 pandemics are believed to have originated from the mixing of bird and human viruses inside pigs), and urged the creation of an official surveillance system for swine flu: an admonition, of course, that went unheeded in a Washington prepared to throw away billions on bioterrorism fantasies.
But 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: both seasonal "drift" and
episodic genomic "shift." But the corporate industrialisation of livestock
production has broken China's natural monopoly on influenza evolution.
Animal husbandry in recent decades has been transformed into something that more closely resembles the petrochemical industry than the happy family farm depicted in school readers.
In 1965, for instance, there were 53m US hogs on more than 1m farms; today, 65m 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 at blinding velocity with their fellow inmates.
Last year a commission convened by the Pew Research Center issued a report on "industrial farm animal production" that underscored the acute danger that "the continual cycling of viruses Š in large herds or flocks [will]
increase opportunities for the generation of novel virus through mutation or recombinant events that could result in more efficient human to human
transmission." The commission also warned that promiscuous antibiotic use in hog factories (cheaper than humane environments) was sponsoring the rise of resistant staph infections, while sewage spills were producing outbreaks of E coli and pfiesteria (the protozoan that has killed 1bn fish in Carolina estuaries and made ill dozens of fishermen).
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). The commission reported systemic obstruction of their investigation by corporations, including blatant threats to withhold funding from cooperative researchers .
This is a highly globalised industry with global political clout. Just as
Bangkok-based chicken giant Charoen Pokphand was able to suppress enquiries into its role in the spread of bird flu in southeast Asia, so it is likely that the forensic epidemiology of the swine flu outbreak will pound its head against the corporate stonewall of the pork industry.
This is not to say that a smoking gun will never be found: there is already
gossip in the Mexican press about an influenza epicentre around a huge
Smithfield subsidiary in Veracruz state. But what matters more (especially
given the continued threat of H5N1) 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.
By Mike Davis
AlterNet
April 28, 2009
The Swine Flu Crisis Lays Bare the Meat Industry's Monstrous Power | Health and Wellness | AlterNet (https://www.alternet.org/healthwellness/138798/the_swine_flu_crisis_lays_bare)
_the_meat_industry%27s_monstrous_power/?page=entire
Animal husbandry now more closely resembles the petrochemical industry than the happy family farm.
The Mexican swine flu, a genetic chimera 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 in 2003, but as an influenza it may be more durable than Sars. Given
that domesticated seasonal type-A influenzas kill as many one million people a year, even a modest increment of virulence, especially if combined with high incidence, could produce carnage equivalent to a major war.
Meanwhile, one of its first victims has been the consoling faith, long
preached by the World Health Organisation, 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 antivirals and (if available) vaccine.
An army of sceptics has contested this viral counter-insurgency approach,
pointing out that microbes can now fly around the world (quite 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, preemptive (and cheap) intervention against avian flu has been invaluable to the cause of rich countries, like the US and UK, who
prefer to invest in their own biological Maginot lines 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/Centres for Disease Control version of pandemic preparedness -- without massive new investment in surveillance, scientific and regulatory infrastructure, basic public 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 warning system has failed as it simply doesn't exist, even in North America and the EU.
Perhaps it is not surprising that Mexico lacks both capacity and political
will to monitor livestock diseases, but the situation is hardly better north
of the border, where surveillance is a failed patchwork of state
jurisdictions, and corporate livestock producers treat health regulations
with the same contempt with which they deal with workers and animals.
Similarly, a decade of urgent warnings by scientists has failed to ensure
the transfer of sophisticated viral assay technology to the countries in the
direct path of likely pandemics. Mexico has world-famous disease experts,
but it had to send swabs to a Winnipeg lab in order to ID the strain's
genome. Almost a week was lost as a consequence.
But no one was less alert than the disease controllers in Atlanta. According
to the Washington Post, the CDC did not learn about the outbreak until six
days after Mexico had begun to impose emergency measures. There should be no excuses. The paradox of this swine flu panic is that, while totally
unexpected, it was accurately predicted. Six years ago, Science dedicated a major story to evidence that "after years of stability, the North American
swine flu virus has jumped onto an evolutionary fasttrack."
Since its identification during the Great Depression, H1N1 swine flu had
only drifted slightly from its original genome. Then in 1998 a highly
pathogenic strain began to decimate sows on a farm in North Carolina and
new, more virulent versions began to appear almost yearly, including a
variant of H1N1 that contained the internal genes of H3N2 (the other type-A flu circulating among humans).
Researchers interviewed by Science worried that one of these hybrids might become a human flu (both the 1957 and 1968 pandemics are believed to have originated from the mixing of bird and human viruses inside pigs), and urged the creation of an official surveillance system for swine flu: an admonition, of course, that went unheeded in a Washington prepared to throw away billions on bioterrorism fantasies.
But 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: both seasonal "drift" and
episodic genomic "shift." But the corporate industrialisation of livestock
production has broken China's natural monopoly on influenza evolution.
Animal husbandry in recent decades has been transformed into something that more closely resembles the petrochemical industry than the happy family farm depicted in school readers.
In 1965, for instance, there were 53m US hogs on more than 1m farms; today, 65m 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 at blinding velocity with their fellow inmates.
Last year a commission convened by the Pew Research Center issued a report on "industrial farm animal production" that underscored the acute danger that "the continual cycling of viruses Š in large herds or flocks [will]
increase opportunities for the generation of novel virus through mutation or recombinant events that could result in more efficient human to human
transmission." The commission also warned that promiscuous antibiotic use in hog factories (cheaper than humane environments) was sponsoring the rise of resistant staph infections, while sewage spills were producing outbreaks of E coli and pfiesteria (the protozoan that has killed 1bn fish in Carolina estuaries and made ill dozens of fishermen).
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). The commission reported systemic obstruction of their investigation by corporations, including blatant threats to withhold funding from cooperative researchers .
This is a highly globalised industry with global political clout. Just as
Bangkok-based chicken giant Charoen Pokphand was able to suppress enquiries into its role in the spread of bird flu in southeast Asia, so it is likely that the forensic epidemiology of the swine flu outbreak will pound its head against the corporate stonewall of the pork industry.
This is not to say that a smoking gun will never be found: there is already
gossip in the Mexican press about an influenza epicentre around a huge
Smithfield subsidiary in Veracruz state. But what matters more (especially
given the continued threat of H5N1) 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.