http://www.arabnews.com/?page=7§ion=0&article=122659&d=19&m=5&y=2009&pix=opinion.jpg&category=Opinion
Tuesday 19 May 2009 (24 Jumada al-Ula 1430)
Swine flu: Lessons we should learn
Gwynne Dyer | Arab News
We seem to have got away with it this time. The swine
flu turned out not to be a global killer, at least not in this first go-round.
But we have had a fright, and maybe we should learn something from it.
In 1994, only 10 percent of American pigs lived out
their brief lives in vast factory farms. Only seven years later, in 2001, 72
percent did. The percentage is even higher today - and it's now known that the
virus that caused the outbreak in Mexico is a direct descendant of one that was
first identified on an industrial-scale pig-raising facility in North Carolina
in 1998.
It's not just pigs. Fewer than three hundred people
have died from the "bird flu" virus since it emerged in Asia in 2003, but if it
became transmissible directly between human beings it could cause a pandemic
that killed tens of millions.
Did the bird flu virus also evolve on a factory farm
where hundreds of thousands of chickens are crowded together? Nobody knows, but
the fact that most chickens everywhere now live in battery farms certainly
enhances the chance of a further mutation that makes the virus transmissible
human-to-human. Industrial-scale livestock raising, a relatively recent
development, is making lethal pandemics ten times more likely than they used to
be.
Ten times? OK, I'm just guessing, and you won't find
scientists going out on a limb like that because they can't prove it.
Scientists who go farther than the evidence will take them end up being
pilloried by their colleagues: In academe, anybody who exposes a flank is
attacked mercilessly by his peers, so the prudent researcher doesn't give voice
to his hunches.
There has only been one major pandemic in the last 100
years, in 1918, and we won't have the hard numbers to show that pandemics have
become ten times more likely until and unless there are 10 major pandemics in
the next hundred years. But when I was interviewing experts about pandemics
five years ago, just after avian flu first emerged, several of them told me off
the record that that was precisely what they expected.
They wouldn't go on the record, of course, so it's left
to journalists like me to say what's on their minds. That is that the way we
are getting most of our meat now is probably going to kill quite a lot of us.
Just one more hazard of living in a mass society obsessed with getting maximum
output at the lowest cost.
Human beings were hardly prey to quick-killer epidemic
diseases at all until they started domesticating animals nine or ten thousand
years ago. Living in our original hunter-and-gatherer groups of a hundred or
less, we were a poor target for diseases that killed their hosts fast, for they
would quickly run out of potential hosts and die off themselves.
However, almost all the animals that human beings
domesticated for food - pigs, sheep, goats, cattle and poultry - lived in large
herds or flocks. They were targets for epidemic diseases, because they had
enough individuals to keep passing the disease on.
As the number of people in human societies grew larger
- thousands, then hundreds of thousands, then tens of millions - they became
potentially vulnerable to similar epidemic diseases. But even though the
farmers often lived under the same roof with their animals, passing viruses
back and forth, it generally took a long time before some minor mutation
enabled the virus to cross the species barrier and thrive in human beings.
During the past several thousand years, major
quick-killer epidemic diseases that affect human beings have emerged, on
average, only once every few hundred years. But now that we keep most of our
livestock in crowded cages for their entire lives, generally living above a
cesspool of their own excrement and exchanging disease pathogens at blinding
speed, the speed of evolution of the pathogens has accelerated dramatically.
"With massive concentrations of farm animals within
which to mutate, these new swine flu viruses in North America seem to be on an
evolutionary fast track, jumping and reassorting between species at an
unprecedented rate," explained Michael Greger, director of public health at the
US Humane Society. The same is true of bird flu viruses, and not just in North
America.
The giant corporations that drove most small
hog-breeders out of business in the United States - from more than a million
farms raising 53 million hogs in 1965 to only 65,000 facilities growing 65
million hogs today - are now active all over the world. In Romania, for
example, the number of hog farmers fell from 477,000 to just 52,000 in only
four years after the agribusiness giants arrived on the scene in 2003.
The new diseases, and new strains of old diseases to
which we have no immunity, will surely come, and not just one, either. We have
created the ideal environment to maximize new mutations among the diseases that
kill large numbers of people, and we will pay a high price. Unless we get out
of factory farming, which does not seem very likely.
But then, pork prices in the United States dropped by
one-fifth between 1970 and 2004, according to the US Department of Agriculture.
That means that factory farming is saving the average American consumer $29 a
year, or about $2.40 a month. What's the risk of a lethal global pandemic
compared to savings like that?
