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vironments for the evolution of flu virulence. By such criteria, pandemic influenza and other deadly in-
fections have a brilliant future.
While the combustible role of Asia's thousands of slums in the development of a future pandemic has
been oddly neglected in the research literature, the great concentrations of urban poverty in Dhaka, Kolk-
ata, Mumbai, and Karachi are presumably like so many lakes of gasoline waiting for the spark of H5N1.
Moreover, the contemporary megaslum may be a crucial link in a new global disease ecology. In 1976
the historian William McNeill proposed that there had been three “historic transitions” in the co-evolution
of humans and microbes: the Neolithic (agro-urban) revolution; the creation of an Eurasian Ecumene in
classical times; and the rise of the modern world system in the sixteenth century. Each transition was a
stage in the biological “reunification” of the human race as well as a corresponding exchange of microbial
parasites. Some epidemiologists now argue that neoliberal globalization represents a fourth transition or
“reshaping of relations between humans and microbes.”
288
Clearly, the crucial environmental conditions
favoring the rise of a new pandemic flu offer a partial model of this larger transitional dynamic.
To recapitulate from earlier chapters, the two global changes that have most favored the accelerated
cross-species evolution of novel influenza subtypes and their global transmission have been the Livestock
Revolution of the 1980-90s (part of the larger world conquest of agriculture by large-scale agro-capital-
ism) and the industrial revolution in South China (the historical crucible of human influenzas) which has
exponentially increased the region's commercial and human intercourse with the rest of the world. The
emergence of Third World “supercities” and their slums, then, would constitute a third global condition
tantamount to Ewald's Western Front as a human medium for potential pandemic spread and virulence
evolution.
Table 12.1.
Urban Density (1000s per km
2
)
(Slums in Italics)
Dharavi
(Mumbai—densest streets)
571.0
Delhi (densest slum)
300.0
Kibera
(Nairobi)
200.0
Cite-Soleil
(Port-au-Prince)
180.0
Lower East Side
(1910)
145.0
City of Dead
(Cairo)
116.0
Les Halles
(Paris, 1850s)
100.0
Imbaba
(Cairo)
84.0
Dhaka (old town)
80.0
Five Points
(New York, 1850)
77.0
Nairobi slums (average)
63.0
Orangi
(Karachi)
50.0
Manhattan (1910)
32.0
Cairo (greater) & Caracas
barrios
25.0
Mumbai & Lagos
20.0
Colonias populares
(Mex. City)
19.0
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