[DEBATE] : The swine flu crisis lays bare the meat industry's monstrous power

[Riaz K Tayob]

The swine flu crisis lays bare the meat industry's monstrous power

The Mexico swine flu outbreak should alert us to a highly globalised 
industry with global political clout Comments (…)

o Mike Davis o guardian.co.uk, Monday 27 April 2009 14.30 BST o larger | 
smaller o Article history


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 … 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.

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