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(Our friend Rob Wallace gets cited in The New Yorker)
Barns packed with animals are good places to breed pathogens.
Monocultures, in which all animals are genetically similar, offer few
speed bumps to transmission. “You got fifty thousand turkeys in a barn,”
Robert Wallace, the author of “Big Farms Make Big Flu,” told me. “They
are all genetically the same, and you are growing them for a turn-around
time of six weeks. That is all food for flu.” Normally, pathogens evolve
to be harmful but not deadly: they want to co-opt hosts without killing
them, so that they can continue their spread. But in the fast-paced
world of an industrial hen house, where birds come and go quickly,
pathogens select for the most virulent strains, no matter how deadly.
Within the uniform predictability of modern agriculture, the
unpredictable emerges.
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/the-pandemic-is-not-a-natural-disaster
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