Bird flu and agribusiness

Another chilling post about bird flu from Revere at Effect Measure. Therein, an EM reader puts the public health crisis in anthropological perspective:

During the past couple of decades, some countries, particularly Thailand and Vietnam, among others, have seen a tremendous growth in large chicken confinements, chicken factories of many thousands of birds in the deplorable conditions we are all familiar with. All the ills, antibiotics, hormones, tremendous disease problems, unhealthy products, etc., are present in these factories. These countries have also entered into international commerce of poultry products, including supplying chicks for yet more huge confinement operations. Thailand for example has become a major supplier of frozen chicken parts to England. Of course, biodiversity has been drastically reduced, with millions of chickens in these farms originating in very few breeding populations.

These huge confinement operations, for all their talk of being hygienic and biosecure, are fertile sources for new diseases or for amplifying and modifying old ones, including, I suspect, the H5N1 strain of avian flu. It is in these industrial developments of chicken raising in Asia that we should search for the origins of the new, highly pathogenic strains, as the ideal conditions for their creation are present. If you look at where this particularly dangerous strain of avian flu has been causing the most problems you will find that it corresponds to those countries that, during the last decade or two, have entered significantly into the poultry "industry" and international commerce of poultry products. One major country that has not entered this international market is India (perhaps by mistake rather than intention). In India, poultry production is still in the hands of small growers with their diverse chicken flocks. India has not been affected, so far, by H5N1.

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[revere]

Three follow-up posts, one up, two to come at Effect Measure. Anthropologist Ronald Nigh has raised an extremely important issue regarding agribusiness and its effect on public health that has largely gone unnoticed: its role in a (near) future influenza pandemic. As a public health professional, this was not on my radar screen. I hope this issue becomes part of the debate.