Mike Davis *
Without Permission
April 28, 2009
Translation: Marta Domènech and Maria Julia Bertucci
Original English: The Guardian, April 27, 2009
Our friend and member of the Editorial Board of SINPERMISO Mike Davis, whose book The monster knocks at our door (trans. Mary Julia Bertucci, Ediciones El Viejo Topo, Barcelona, \u200b\u200b2006) warned brilliantly lucid and the danger of an avian flu pandemic worldwide, now explains how the great global livestock industry has laid the groundwork for a more than worrying outbreak of swine influenza in Mexico.
Mexican swine flu, a genetic chimera probably conceived in the fecal sludge of industrial gorrinera threatens suddenness with a fever the whole world. Outbreaks in North America reveal an infection that is traveling faster and the traveling with the last official pandemic strain, the Hong Kong flu in 1968.
Stealing prominence to our last official murderer, the H5N1 virus this pig virus poses a threat of unknown magnitude. It seems less lethal than the SARS [Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, for its acronym in English] in 2003, but, like influenza, may be more durable than SARS. Because domesticated seasonal flu type A kill anything less than a million people a year, even a modest increase in virulence, especially if it combined with a high incidence could produce carnage equivalent to a major war.
This is one of the first victims had been the consoling faith, preached inveterately by the World Health Organization (WHO), the possibility of containing pandemics with immediate responses from health bureaucracies and regardless of the quality of local public health. Since the first H5N1 deaths in 1997 in Hong Kong, WHO, with the support of most national health authorities, has promoted a strategy focused on the identification and isolation of a pandemic strain on your local radio outbreak followed by a mass administration of antiviral drugs and vaccines, if available, to the population.
A legion of skeptics have criticized the viral counterinsurgency approach, noting that microbes can now fly around the world almost literally in the case of bird flu more quickly than the WHO or local officials may come to react to the original outbreak. These experts have also noted the primitive, and often non-existent, monitoring of the interface between human and animal diseases. But the myth of a bold intervention, preemptive (and cheap) avian influenza has proved invaluable to the cause of the rich countries like the U.S. and the UK, prefer to invest in their own biological Maginot lines, rather than increasing dramatically support for advanced epidemic fronts overseas. Nor price has been this myth for large pharmaceutical corporations, facing a relentless war with the demands of the developing countries engaged in the production require public key generic antivirals like Tamiflu patented by Roche.
The version of the WHO and the Centers for Disease Control, according to which it is already prepared for a pandemic, without further need for massive new investment in surveillance, scientific and regulatory infrastructure, public health Basic and global access to vital drugs will now be decisively tested by the swine flu, and perhaps find out belonging to the same category of management "ponzificada" risk that securities and obligations of Madoff. It is so difficult that the warning system fails, since it simply does not exist. Even in North America and the European Union .
perhaps not surprising that Mexico lacks both capacity and political will to manage poultry and livestock diseases, but it happens that the situation is hardly better north of the border, where surveillance is undone by unhappy state jurisdictions and large livestock enterprises face the health regulations with the same contempt with which often treat workers and animals. Similarly, a decade of warnings from scientists failed to point to ensure transfer of experimental viral sophisticated technology to countries along the routes most likely pandemic. Mexico has world renowned health experts, but you have to send samples to a laboratory in Winnipeg for decoding the genome of the strain. This has lost a whole week.
But no less alert the authorities for Disease Control in Atlanta. According to the Washington Post , the CDC [English acronyms Center for Disease Control, based in Atlanta; T] he was not aware of the outbreak six days after Mexico had begun to impose emergency measures. No excuses. The paradox of this swine flu is that, even if totally unexpected, had already been predicted with great accuracy. Six years ago, the journal Science devoted a major article to bring out that "after years of stability, the swine influenza virus in North America has been a rapid evolutionary leap."
Since its identification during the Great Depression, the H1N1 virus of swine influenza were only experienced a slight drift from their original genome. Then in 1998 a highly pathogenic strain began to decimate sows on a farm in North Carolina, and began to raise new and more virulent versions every year, including a variant of H1N1 that contained the internal genes of H3N2 (which causes the other influenza A that spreads among humans).
The researchers interviewed by Science were concerned about the possibility that one of these hybrids could turn into a human flu virus, it is believed that the pandemics of 1957 and 1968 were caused by a mixture of human and avian genes forged inside pig-organisms, and urged the creation of a formal system for swine influenza surveillance: admonition, needless to say, which turned a deaf ear then a Washington willing to throw billions of dollars for bioterrorism fantasies sink .
What caused this acceleration in the evolution of swine flu? Virologists have long been convinced that the intensive farming system of southern China is the main vector of mutation Influenza: both the "drift" seasonal and episodic "exchange" genomic. But industrialization granempresarial livestock production has broken China's natural monopoly in the evolution of flu. The livestock sector has been transformed in recent decades into something more like the petrochemical industry to depict happy family farm textbooks in school.
In 1965, for example, in the U.S. had 53 million pigs distributed among more than a million farms, today, 65 million pigs are concentrated in 65,000 facilities. That has meant moving from the old-fashioned pens to cyclopean fecal hell in which, among manure and sweltering heat, ready to share pathogens to lightning speed are piled tens of thousands of animals rather than weakened immune systems.
Last year, a commission convened by the Pew Research Center published a report on "industrial farm animal production, which highlights the acute risk that" the continued circulation of virus (...) property of vast herds, flocks or herds increases the opportunities of developing new episodes of virus mutation or recombination, which could generate more efficient virus transmission between humans. " The commission also warned that the promiscuous use of antibiotics factories in cheaper than pig-human environments, was encouraging the rise of infections resistant estafílocóquicas while generating waste water in outbreaks of e coli scherichia and Pfiesteria (a protozoan that killed a billion fish in the estuaries of Carolina and infected dozens of fishermen).
Any improvement in the ecology of this new pathogen would have to face the monstrous power of big business conglomerates poultry and livestock, such as Smithfield Farms (pork and beef) and Tyson (chicken). The committee discussed systematic obstruction of investigations by large companies, including nothing demure about threats to suppress the financing of the researchers who cooperated with the commission.
is a highly globalized industry and political influence. Just as the poultry giant Charoen Pokphand, based in Bangkok, was able to thwart the investigation of his role in the spread of bird flu in Southeast Asia, is most likely that forensic epidemiology of the outbreak of swine flu was given on his face against the stone wall of the swine industry.
That does not mean that you will not ever find a smoking gun prosecution, and rumor in the Mexican press of an influenza epicenter located around a giant Smithfield subsidiary in the state of Veracruz. But more important, especially because of the continuing threat of H5N1 virus - is the forest, not the trees: the failed strategy of the WHO pandemic, the continuing deterioration of global public health, the gag imposed by the large transnational pharmaceutical to vital medicines and planetary catastrophe that is industrialized livestock production and environmentally insane.
* Mike Davis is a member of the Editorial Board of SINPERMISO . Recently translated into Castilian: his book on the threat of avian influenza ( The monster knocks at our door , trans. Maria Julia Bertucci, Ediciones El Viejo Topo, Barcelona, \u200b\u200b2006), his book on the Dead Cities (trad. Dina Khorasane, Marta Malo de Molina, Tatiana de la O and Monica Cifuentes Zaro, Editorial dreams Dealers, Madrid, 2007) and his book holocausts of the late Victorian era (trad. Aitana and Ivano Guide i Conca Stocco, Ed University of Valencia, Valencia, 2007). His most recent books are: In Praise of Barbarians: Essays Against Empire (Haymarket Books, 2008) and Buda's Wagon : A Brief History of the Car Bomb (Verso, 2007; Mundó Jordi English translation of the editorial El Viejo Topo, Barcelona, \u200b\u200b2009).
Translation w w w.sinpermiso.info : Marta Domènech and Maria Julia Bertomeu.
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