Is it a sign of the apocalypse? Or even a new phenomenon? Mike Davis thinks not:
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.
I think Davis’ article is unfair to the the WHO. Its pandemic strategy is still viable, but not for the really highly transmissive strains like this one. It’s like the fires in Victoria – the existing risk management was exceeded by the rapidity and severity of the event.
So it’s fair to demand a rethink. This one comes into the class of wicked problems, so the point is not to find who to blame, but is to get at the underlying dynamics and conflicting interests. And with that, he is spot on with factory farming (big farmers) and the control of the big pharmas opposing widespread manufacturing of generic drugs for developing country peoples.
The focus on factory farming has been on SE Asia, but is worldwide. So with Mexico, NAFTA has to come into the picture because of the dependence of the US on Mexico for meat and illegal drugs. The latter and its affect on governance is preventing Mexico from implementing environmental reform to make the former even remotely safe. The global trade in factory meats is far riskier than the international lentil market, for example.
Very fast pandemics, according to all the modelling, cannot be stopped but can be slowed. They need to be tackled both at the root cause and by slowing the thing long enough to get the treatments to all who need it. I reckon much of the current approbrium is coming from people who want to blame someone for the fact they themselves are exposed, dressed up as concern for others.
Before Mike Davis and others get too excited, we’d better be sure there is a pandemic. I agree that US agribusiness practices in Mexico need a serious looking at, but let’s not yet presume there is a pandemic and the WHO has failed to act towards it.
All of this speculation is costing Mexican people seriously, now. I am aware of two Australian universities that have forbidden their staff to travel to Mexico which, if many more do it, will have a devastating effect on a conference being held there (IAMCR) in July.
I heard Anna Bligh and Paul Lucas thinking out loud about whether to cancel State of Origin on the news last night. Since neither of them would be considered to know much about pandemics, its another example of everyone leaping in on this well before the fact are known.
I’m calling ‘beat up’ on this one, just another slow news week.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza
As I’m still waiting for swine flu to mutate and take to piracy on the high seas, I think the whole story and response is so much hype
But there’s some interetsing stuff on the Mexican background and US factory farming here
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article22518.htm
What others have said re beat up, speculation and jumping the gun, only more so.
I don’t really like going the ad hom route, but there are so few facts and verifiable sources (the Pew Centre – noted experts on virology and pandemics, are they? – backed up solely by an unidentified “army of sceptics” ) in this lightweight attempted character assassination of the usual suspects that it is difficult to address it any other way.
When one sees so many of the favourite villains of the left – “big pharma”, corporate industrialisation of farming, the dastardly and incompetent Americans with their “bio-terrorism fantasies”, etc – pulled together in such a poorly documented piece, and in the Grauniad naturally, one does tend to think “ho hum, just another shameless seizing of an opportunity to vent pre-conceived ideological prejudices, complete waste of pixels”.
There will be lessons to learn in due course from this event, and some of them, may even be in the territory covered by this article, but at the very least it is at this stage jumping the gun in a big way.
“further decline of world public health”
Decline from what? 6 billion and rising is a decline?
It is easy to seamlessly slip a potential pandemic into the comfortable narrative of anti-capitalist critique, and there may be some nuggets in such an amalgamation, but is it also simply possible that microbiology remains nature’s last bastion against human control, one that modernity has significantly eroded?
On early over-reacting: I guess part of preventing pandemics involves making the call before it is too late, erring on the side of caution, and restricting things such as travel that lead to proliferation.
Suggesting officials wait until they can be certain it is a full blown pandemic is a bit like the kooky right suggesting we wait until we have far stronger proof, such as Bondi going under water, before acting on climate change. It might be a little bit late by then…
We all know the story of fox and rabbit populations how when the rabbits get numerous the foxes increase to cut the numbers then both populations crash.
With 8 Billion + on this place, perhaps it is our turn for an “adjustment”.
Yep, massive jumping of the gun.
Factory farming, and Big Pharma, may be teh evil, but it doesn’t make them responsible for this particular outbreak.
As for the WHO, Roger is right. We aren’t going to stop a highly transmissible influenza virus until (and if) we have a flu vaccine that protects against all strains, not just specific ones.
Even if it isn’t to be this time, still Davies’ engine of viral mutation:
requires serious contemplation.
Yes, indeed, humans have achieved a population of 6 billion plus because of the nutritional contributions of the above-described methods.
Perhaps the occasional pandemic is a price worth paying.
But where is the forum where that proposition can be debated and a negative finding can be enforced?
Which is why I don’t eat pork anymore Katz. But this sems to be such a fear inducing beat up. How many people die every day in the world through preventable disease? Now, suddenly the end is nigh.
“Is it a beat-up?”, “a slow week for news”, time will tell – although if this “pandemic” is a fizzer, everyone can say it was “overcome” by the alertness of the “authorities”.
But the important issue remains very valid, and that is the interconnectedness of our world, shows we cannot let the vast majority of the world’s population live in abject poverty – while we squander the world’s resources living in luxury.
This way of living will come back to bite us – if not now, then at some point or other.
Whether this event will bite us very hard or not, only time will tell.
But it is going to be just one of many assaults that gross injustice and inequality will breed.
We – that tiny percentage of the world living in luxury – have to do something seriously sensible about the vast majority of the world’s population who live in poverty, die in huge numbers from hunger, who have little or no safe drinking water, and whose health and hygiene is a daily blight to our own humanity!
We have to assume that every human life is important and needs to be respected.
The old adage of: “Live simply, so others may simply live” sounds very smart and practical in these circumstances.
Chickens and beef are also raised under similar conditions. In the US beef feedlots can be smelled long before they are sighted — heaving mounds of bovine misery.
I’m a bit dubious of the liberal guilt argument that because lots of poor folks are dying of malaria, etc., it ill-behoves the rich part of the world to be a bit concerned about some pandemic that may rumble down their leafy streets.
The end isn’t nigh. The worst imaginable swine flu won’t kill everyone. However, it may kill many folks long before they gain access to their superannuation payouts.
@5
Just another attempt by the right to defend their greedy and unsustainable practises by calling the other side ideolouges, ho-hum. Go live on a high intensity pig farm.
Flu is flu. It mutates. Sometimes in animals, sometimes in humans. It doesn’t have a political agenda.
To be honest I think that what’s being done already is about as good as can be done: temporarily empty public places, where possible isolate possible cases, start work on a vaccine and begin distributing stockpiled antiviral drugs.
Ironically enough all the years of scary stories about bird flu have led to very large stockpiles of masks and antivirals.
Mervin @ 11
If you took your ideological blinkers off for 1 second you would soon discover that, thanks to Capitalism, the world is in fact rapidly getting better for those who embrace it. The remaining disaster areas are almost exclusively found in non Capitalist areas.
Peter @ 15:
Who told you that – the Toothfairy?
Big farmers, Big Pharma… this is going to be highly confusing to me as I get a lot of my daily news from radio.
Flu is flu. It mutates. Sometimes in animals, sometimes in humans. It doesn’t have a political agenda.
ORLY. Very clever jacques, but I think most people here can see a fairly strong nexus between industrial corporations, neoliberal governments, boosterism for globalisation and mass consumption, dismantling biosecurity through trade agreements, denigration of candidates and policies labelled “green”, and Lib/Lab politics in the last 10 years.
Helen, that may be the case, but:
it’s not at all clear here that industrial agriculture and “dismantling of biosecurity through trade agreements increases the risk of flu epidemics.
As I understand it, it’s in large part proximity of humans and animals that increases the risk of the kind of hybridization that creates new, dangerous flu strains. That’s actually more likely in small-scale subsistence farming than it is in industrial mega-feedlots.
Not saying for a moment that there aren’t other problems with factory farming, chief amongst them animal welfare and antibiotic usage.
Wombo @ 15
No – facts. You should check them out sometime instead of reading the Green Left Weakly for all YOUR ‘facts’.
FACT: Anyone who has travelled to SE Asia over the last 40 years, as I have, will recognize the huge strides most of these countries have made. As a tiny example, 40 years ago any SE Asian airport you went to was used exclusively by ‘Europeans’. Barely an asian person to be seen unless they were manning a shop or sweeping the floor. Now, if you go to an airport you will, as a European, be in a tiny minority, drowned out by the millions of middle class asian families off on holidays. Millions. Nearly all these countries have embraced Globalization and Capitalism to a greater or lesser extent.
FACT: There are now 10′s of millions of middle class Chinese. Travel to Europe ( even Aus – haven’t you noticed??) some time and you will see them holidaying.
FACT: Well over 100 million Indians now consider themselves middle class. Since changing from a thoroughly bureaucratic, socialistic, policy 15 or 20 years ago, growth has picked up enormously and pulled millions out of absolute, starvation level, poverty and on a path that will – DESPITE YOUR BEST EFFORTS – lead them to a middle class existence, where they no longer have to worry about where their next meal is coming from.
According to the Economist, 1/2 of the developing world now considers themselves middle class,up from 1/3 in 1990. There are now about 2 Billion ‘middle class’ in the developing world. Their way of thinking – globalization and democracy – is changing much for the better.
It’s sad that you and many here are stuck in such outmoded thinking. There is an old saying: “None so blind…”. Fortunately it doesn’t matter because the rest of the world is simply ignoring you.
“antibiotic usage”
Which creates resistant strains. Not relevant to viruses of course, but pertinent perhaps.
Robert Merkel
Your point is about the same as I wanted to make. Industrial farming (Ive worked on a mixed piggery myself) means a large pool of amimals for a virus to pass through. Competent management should minimise this.
The older type farming sees much closer people to animal relations, but limits the pool of animals it may pass through.
And if we go right back then we end up with people living cheeck by jowl with a tiny number of animals (PNG for example).
So theres pros and cons to all types of farming, it would be silly to push an animal lib agenda onto what MAY turn out to be old farming practices, rather than factory farming.
Peter @ 19,
I’ll jump in on this one. A couple of observations,
Everybody knows the socialists are responsible for the GFC, not the rapacious mega-rich capitalist bankers. We’ve been plotting it for years, but we’ve engineered it so the capitalists take the blame.
WTF!
Much more seriously, and as I haven’t read the most recent news on the pig flu, I might be out of date, but how come, so far as I know, the only place where people have died is Mexico, which is a Third World country?
Apologies for accidentally clicking mouse twice and repeating comment.
I thought that this so called ‘Swine flu’ hadn’t actually been found in pigs. A virus would have jumped from a pig to a human, and then undergone ‘reassortment’ with another influenza virus circulating to produce a completely novel virus, with a porcine H1 protein. Which is now being transmitted from human to human, not through pigs.
A possible danger here is if this new virus combines with other endemic influenza strains (or birdflu? But that would have to happen in a human with both ‘Swine’ and Bird’ flu), producing another novel, virulent virus (huhuh, virulent virus).
I’m really not sure where industrial farming practices fit in with this, since the inital transmission of a virus from a pig to a human could, for all we know, have happened in a small family home between an old woman and her pet pig…
I thought Mike’s article made sense. In fact I had just posted another article on my site which ended up with a quote from him before I cam across this debate.
I would suggest one possibility is that the outbreak and the impact are, or will be if it accelerates, a result of concentrated poverty.
A war on poverty would be a good first step in reducing the likelihood of global pandemics. (I am not saying this is one, yet).
As to facts, peter@19. The gains of the last ten years or so in lifting many people out of poverty have been wiped out almost overnight with the Great Recession and increasing food prices. Again a war on poverty might help address that but imperialism’s priority is to kill Iraqis or Afghanis or Tibet or wherever it chooses (at far greater cost) than to abolish poverty.
The money and skills exist to do that. The priorities aren’t there. Profit rules, not people.
Paul @ 22 & 23
I think we are getting a bit off topic. I note though, that you don’t dispute any of my facts. Perhaps on another thread we can debate the GFC.
BTW: I was wrong about Indian middle class numbers. About 300 million now consider themselves part of it. The figures vary according to ones definition, but poverty has dropped by roughly half in the last 2 decades. This coincides directly with their change of direction from socialism to free enterprise and globalization ( though it still has a long way to go in this regard ). This is a vast difference from when you and I were kids – India was considered a permanent basket case – as was most of SE Asia.
Paul: that’s one of the big mysteries about this so far.
A possible clue might be that the WHO’s official total of people who’ve died from the flu outbreak is much smaller than those totals floating around in the media.
All this talk about economic systems being to blame for the outbreak is nonsense on stilts.
We don’t yet know precisely where and how the virus came from, and instead of waiting to find out, people are constructing the sloppiest arguments. If the virus came from industrial farming — it’s capitalism’s fault! But if instead it came from a peasant village — it’s also capitalism’s fault, for not having magically raised every human being out of poverty yet! Everything’s capitalism’s fault, innit?
If a virus emerges from Cuba, should we blame socialism?
Give Mercurius’ Agincourt Award to the next person who tries to link economics to a disease outbreak.
Mark – This is obviously the Lord’s punishment for our disgusting disregard of kashrut. I’m sorry but I’m afraid the Jews were right..
John @ 26
I agree a reduction of poverty would be a good thing. Richer people can afford a cleaner environment and the research required to prevent disease. But I am afraid a ‘War on Poverty’ is the wrong way to go about it. This top down development, where ‘experts’ decide what mega projects should be built etc. is a failed, socialist model. Much better start at the bottom and encourage enterprise via micro loans ( eg. Grameen Bank ) and the removal of artificial impediments as in India, China and elsewhere.
As for Imperialists killing Iraqis I think you’ll find that most Iraqis are killed by their neighbors. Fortunately that too is in steep decline.
Peter @ 15: My “idealogical blinkers” make it impossible for me to see the apparent advances in the condition of “the vast majority of the world’s population”?
I wasn’t aware I was delivering an idealogical message – just a comment based on a humanitarian disaster that is engulfing so much of the world.
The relevance of that to this gathering possible pandemic lies in the immense and unlimit-able movement of people, food stuffs, products and contaminants of every kind.
My suggesting that, to do something about this “abject poverty” – that is so evident out there in so much of the world, which may just ensure we don’t get blown away by a germ generated tsunami – is presumably also clap-trap, blasting out of my idealogically fevered brow?
Mate, if we can’t do something sensible about world poverty, out of a humanitarian concern for others, try doing it to provide a safer future for yourself.
And I’m the idealogue? – who can’t afford to let my idealogical guard down – even for “1 second”!
Regarding livestock production, I am worried that Coles chickens give me a headache. This also occurs when I eat those disgusting (although some are better than others) noodles.
Its gotta be chemicals, right? Preservatives? Can’t be good for you…
On another note, the Coles at Market Town in Newcastle wouldn’t let a 15 year old girl go to the hospital after she burnt her hand in the bakery. They bandaged it instead – tightly! Told to me by the checkout chick after I overheard them talking; apparently she rewrapped it and advised the girl to see the union. But 15… i mean, it was only her first or second shift I think.
I guess it shows why we still need unions.
Mervyn @ 32
I have already explained the best way to eliminate poverty – Capitalism – ie. private property and voluntary exchange.
You ARE delivering an ideological message. You are stating that our way of life is wrong. That we squander the worlds resources. That we live in ‘luxury’. That this inequality is unjust. Implicit in all this is that ‘they’ are poor because we are rich. This muddle headed thinking is wrong in so many ways it is hard to know even where to begin. You seem to think that we can all live some simple life – with the internet bolted on. Sorry, but it won’t happen.
BTW – please don’t put words into my mouth. I didn’t say ‘the vast majority of the world’s population’ was advancing. I said that those that have embraced the free market have advanced. Fortunately the idea is catching on – but faster please. The game is up. Closet totalitarians such as yourself are reduced to grumbling at the margins.
I read something years ago about Pharmaceutical companies actually developing viruses in their sick twisted labs.
They also develop antibiotics, vaccines etc to “cure” the viruses they create.
Then they unleash their “pet” into society, thus calling for a demand of supplies that they themselves have developed.
Resulting in a small *cough* fortune profit.
Bizarre?
I don’t know.
It’s just something I heard.
Maybe I read too much.
=)
Well we can go off and panic about the Swine Flu all we want. But the latest from the Qld this arvo is this.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/04/30/2557140.htm?section=australia
Absolutely disgraceful.
Deidrie @ 35
Please get a life. There is too much of this bullshit going around already, believed by gullible fools. Saying it here will only add to that. Shhesh!!!!!
Peter @ #34 & 35. No I’m not putting words in your mouth. It was my comment about the “vast majority of the world”.
And no, I can’t see there is anything like a level playing field out there for third world countries – just what non-capitalist countries you can be thinking of eludes me.
I think it is very relevant that poverty and disease, endemic in so much of the world, has great possibilities for infecting us. None of us are not coccooned in a bubble, like Michael Jackson likes to be.
I’d happily push the discussion along, but with comments from you like:
“Closet totalitarians such as yourself are reduced to grumbling at the margins.”
I think it is pointless.
Your inability to respond within the bounds of reasoned debate and with such unconcealed spite is troubling. Perhaps the whole issue of just how indebted we are, to the poverty stricken third world for our affluent and luxurious lifestyle, affects you personally more than you have ever acknowledged.
No, too little. I recommend you start with [i]The Skeptic[/i] and [i]The Demon-Haunted World[/i] work on from there.
Oh sod, now everyone knows I visit sites that use BBCode.
Diedre – I think you may be confusing biological viruses with computer ones.
There you go again Mervyn. Blaming our system – Capitalism – for the poverty of the rest of the world. Despite what you may think, I have seen a lot of the world, and a hell of a lot of poverty so I know the extent of the problem. But please explain to me the rise of South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, Malaysia, Brazil, China and more recently India and Indonesia. Virtually all these countries were written off as unsaveable – doomed to eternal misery – less than 50 years ago. But one by one they realized that the way out of poverty was to implement free market policies and globalization. As they got wealthier they got healthier. Wealthier people also care much. much more about their environment and can actually do something about it.
You make the basic mistake – very common on the left – of assuming a fixed size pie. More for us, less for them. This leads many on the left to advocate policies ( more aid – less trade ) that are directly contrary to the interests of the poor of the world. So yes, I do STRONGLY object to your way of thinking. This is not spite, it is contempt.
Make the pie higher!
Yep!
Its funny though Peter, all the countries you mention there – with the exception of India – have experienced their greatest economic growth while maintaining authoritarian political regimes.
Would you then conclude then the alleged connection between free markets and democracy has been …well… a bit of misleading claptrap from certain ideological friends on the right?
Dierdre @35: I seem to recall that the ‘Big Pharma creating diseases to sell more drugs’ trope was part of the plot of Oryx and Crake, a science fiction novel by Margaret Atwood.
The theory that Big Pharma and factory farms are to blame for ‘swine flu’ seems contradicted by the fact that the big one, the killer Spanish flu of 1919 that dispatched north of 20 million, happened before those things were invented.
Oh I don’t know. Maybe it’s got something to do with the socialist, pinko, commie presidents.
I’ve throughly scrubbed my hands and been plastic-draped and hair-capped before being ushered into some of the world’s leading biotech facilities. And socialised afterwards (got pissed) with some of the people afterwards
My observations are that:
- deliberately creating a human/ecosystem targeted plague for profit would make pretty much make any Australian scientist punch anybody who suggested it right in the eye.
- mind you if the proposition was presented as a national security thing a la some of Oliphant’s and Macfarlane Burnet’s more outre view, it would be listened to respectfully by today’s scientists. Then they’d punch the old farts right in the eye.
Really, the scientists smart enough to create a true killer pandemic are too smart to do it just for money. Big stuff like posterity, altruism, fucking over rivals and the sheer challenge of doing what others say is impossible is what really moves ‘em. Or if it’s a last resort if our way of life is immentially threatened.
Go for a drive down Royal Parade in Melbourne, up towards and beyond the Percy Grainger Museum. To your left you will see at lot of small innocuous brick buildings with massive hi-tech extensions trailing out behind them. One of the world’s great biomedicine precincts. And run and staffed by people acutely that if their translational work ever gets comprised by tawdry commercial or farcical national security interests, then their hard-won credibility would swirl right down the same drains they use for the leftover bits of the research rats which Melbourne now exports to the world. (You order them online, specifying which gene pairs you’d like knocked out of their DNA).
I suspect I may have contradicted myself above. Somewhere. Very well, I contain multitudes. And half a bottle of 18 year old Glenmorangie as well. The Quinta Ruban natch.
That is Congresswoman Michele ‘may not always get her words right, but she knows that her heart is right‘ Bachmann we’re talking about…
Laphroaig for me tonight. I ruined my back on the weekend, still can’t sleep so trying to catch up on some work. It’s got a lovely smokey flavour. Not dissimilar to what my old neighbour, Graham, used to crank out (’nuff buried under his shed for 50 Christmases!)
There is an interesting blog post about this at New Scientist, looking into where the virus came from and how the pork industry is blurring the science.
Yes lets get rid of factory farming. That way nobody will ever die of swine flu because they’ll already be dead from starvation.
Worser still is the Aussie yobbo spreading this pig thing round the ol dart.
http://news.theage.com.au/breaking-news-national/second-aussie-confirmed-with-flu-in-uk-20090502-aqg6.html
The way they are on about it you’d think he had the Ebola virus. It’s the flu!
Yer, it’s crazy. The giveaway is that the two testing positive are merely asked to stay indoors.