Inside China's Uniquely Effective Incubators For New Strains Of Influenza - NYT

[hatrack]

EDIT

Every few months, it seems, an invasive virus from a distant land attacks the Americas: dengue, chikungunya and, most recently, Zika. But the pathogens that frighten me most are novel strains of avian influenza. I’d come to see their birthplace. Highly virulent and easily transmissible, these viruses emerge from open-air poultry farms and markets of the kind that stretch across Asia. Thanks to rising demand for chicken and other poultry, they’ve been surfacing at an accelerated clip, causing nearly 150 percent more outbreaks in 2015 than in 2014. And in late 2014, one strain managed to cross the ocean that had previously prevented its spread into the Americas, significantly expanding its reach across the globe.

Novel avian influenza viruses are mongrels, born when the influenza viruses that live harmlessly inside the bodies of wild ducks, geese and other waterfowl mix with those of domesticated animals like the ones at Jiangfeng, especially poultry but also pigs. It’s possible to squelch their emergence. One way is to protect domesticated animals from the excreta of waterfowl, which can spread infection. But no such protections are in effect at markets such as Jiangfeng, which, like the rest of southern China’s booming poultry industry, lies within the East Asian flyway, one of the world’s most important waterbird migration routes.

The poultry enclosures are open to the air. Droppings from the birds in cages as well as the birds flying overhead coat the floor. Stony-faced women with shovels push the mess into reeking, shoulder-height heaps of wet mush. Any virus that lurks in those piles can easily spread to the birds and the people who tend them. Up to 10 percent of poultry workers in Hong Kong, a study has found, have been exposed to bird flu. A fine dust of desiccated bird waste permeates the air. It settles on the leaves of the workers’ makeshift vegetable plots behind the cages and on the window panes of their nearby flats.

These markets and the unique viral ecology they enable are not new, as Malik Peiris, a virologist at the University of Hong Kong, points out. But “now the situation is very different,” he said. “This is being done on a much bigger scale than it was years ago.” As health-conscious consumers in the West cut beef out of their diets and newly affluent Asians add more meat to theirs, demand for bird flesh has skyrocketed. Global poultry production has more than quadrupled since 1970. And nowhere has the taste for poultry risen faster than in Asia, where chicken farming expanded by nearly 4.5 percent a year from 2000 to 2012. China now consumes more chicken than the United States. Tyson Foods aims to double production in China. “We just can’t build the houses fast enough,” Donnie Smith, the company’s chief executive, said to The Wall Street Journal, referring to poultry production buildings, and “we’re going absolutely as fast as we know how to go.”

EDIT

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/07/opinion/sunday/what-you-get-when-you-mix-chickens-china-and-climate-change.html?ref=opinion

[rjsquirrel]

1. Hideous

our poor planet.

Sometimes you wonder whether a virus wiping out humans wouldn't be Gaia's revenge.

[NickB79]

2. With population densities what they are in Asia, an avian pandemic would spread like wildfire

The death toll would be horrific.

The only upshot is that the death of a billion or more humans globally, and the destruction of international commerce that would go hand-in-hand with such an outbreak, would give Nature a chance to regenerate and offset some of the environmental and climatic damage we've inflicted so far.

[Nihil]

3. Good. (n/t)

[NeoGreen]

4. No, not "good"...

...maybe inevitable but I wouldn't classify it as "good".

I would agree that human population has overshot the capacity of the planet to sustain/support, but I would not call the presumably premature deaths (that is what is being discussed) of a billion+ people as good.

We do need to reduce our global population, but this is not a method/means I would celebrate.

Sorry, I cannot agree.

NG

[Nihil]

5. I would say it is better than most of the alternatives.

> We do need to reduce our global population, but this is not a method/means I would celebrate.

There is no truly "good" method of reducing the population by a billion (or several billion) people.
That much I will agree with you.

Slow starvation is not good.

Herding people into regions where they will die (or be killed) is not good.

Stealing the water of a population is not good.

Nuclear war is not good.

Endless conventional war is not good.

A virulent & fast-acting fatal disease is better than any of the above (IMO)
and so I view it as a "good" solution to a very unpleasant yet unavoidable
problem. YMMV.

[NeoGreen]

6. I think we agree...

...almost entirely, but I just knee-jerked against calling that option, or any of the likely options/scenarios as "good".

There is no truly "good" method of reducing the population by a billion (or several billion) people.

Apologies for acting as the semantic-police-person, but I do shutter at our future prospects on this issue, and wouldn't want to gloss over the hard choices that we face with any suggestion that any of them are "good".