Taking the brakes off the spread of viruses

The mainstream media, always in love with the idea of a big scare, are helping to feed bird flu hysteria.

Not to overlook the fact that H5N1 the potential to mutate into something horrible, but the consequences of overselling the threat could also be—in fact have already been—disastrous. If the solution continues to be destroying and prohibiting small-scale free-ranging flocks of chickens, it could be a calamity for the world's poor who depend on their chickens, and for all of us, who stand to be driven even further into dependence on an appalling and unhealthy factory chicken-producing system.

Wendy Orent, author of Plague, has been a voice of reason on this topic. First, as she pointed out a couple of weeks ago, the idea of Bird Flu having the potential to mutate suddenly, naturally, into something like the 1918 pandemic betrays an ignorance of how that flu became lethal. It took a disease factory—"the trenches, the trucks, the trains and the hospitals of World War I," according to evolutionary biologist Paul W. Ewald of the University of Louisville—to create the conditions for the virus to mutate from something harmless to something deadly. A few chickens or wild birds can't make that happen.

Writes Orent: "To think that the 1918 flu started out as a harmless intestinal bird virus that jumped directly from its wild host into human beings and immediately turned into an explosive respiratory killer is to believe that hippos fly."

It so happens that our age has its own disease factories as well as a difficult-to-regulate virus distribution network. In arguing that the price of cheap chicken is bird flu, Orent cites Earl Brown, a University of Ottawa flu virologist, who states that "lethal bird flu is entirely man-made, first evolving in commercially produced poultry in Italy in 1878. The highly pathogenic H5N1 is descended from a strain that first appeared in Scotland in 1959."

People have been living with backyard flocks of poultry since the dawn of civilization. But it wasn't until poultry production became modernized, and birds were raised in much larger numbers and concentrations, that a virulent bird flu evolved. When birds are packed close together, any brakes on virulence are off. Birds struck with a fatal illness can still easily pass the disease to others, through direct contact or through fecal matter, and lethal strains can evolve. Somehow, the virus that arose in Scotland found its way to China, where, as H5N1, it has been raging for more than a decade.

... Brown says the commercial poultry industry, which caused the catastrophe in the first place, stands to benefit most. The conglomerates will more and more dominate the poultry-rearing business. Some experts insist that will be better for us. Epidemiologist Michael Osterholm at the University of Minnesota, for instance, contends that the "single greatest risk to the amplification of the H5N1 virus, should it arrive in the U.S. through migratory birds, will be in free-range birds … often sold as a healthier food, which is a great ruse on the American public."

The truly great ruse is that industrial poultry farms are the best way to produce chickens — that Perdue Farms and Tyson Foods and Charoen Pokphand are keeping the world safe from backyard poultry and migratory birds. But what's going to be on our tables isn't the biggest problem. The real tragedy is what's happened in Asia to people who can't afford cheap, industrial chicken. And the real victims of industrially produced, lethal H5N1 have been wild birds, an ancient way of life and the poor of the Earth, for whom a backyard flock has always represented a measure of autonomy and a bulwark against starvation.

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