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

[Dennis Brasky <dmozart1756@xxxxxxxxx>]

>
>
>
> The Mexico swine flu outbreak should alert us to a
> highly globalised industry with global political clout
>
> Mike Davis
> guardian.co.uk, Monday 27 April 2009
>
> clip -
>
> 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.
>
> full ---
>

<http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/apr/27/swine-flu-mexico-health
>
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