Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Stefan Pattyn, the editor of
Ebola Virus
Haemorrhagic Fever
, wrote: “The larger the
scale of man-made environmental changes,
the greater must be the probability of
emergence of a zoonosis, old or new.”
—Pattyn, S.R., ed. 1978.
Ebola Virus Haemorrhagic
Fever
. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Elsevier North
Holland Biomedical Press.
domesticated by our ancestors, influenza has always been one of
our most contagious infections. Only with the emergence of H5N1
has this virus also emerged as one of our deadliest.
H5N1, the killer strain of avian influenza spreading out of Asia,
has so far killed but a handful of people. The reason there is so
much concern about bird flu, even in a world in which millions
continue to die of diseases like tuberculosis and AIDS, is because
the last time a bird flu virus jumped into humans, it triggered the
deadliest plague in human history, killing 50 to 100 million people
around the globe. Originating from bird flu, the 1918 flu pandemic
killed more people in twenty-five weeks than AIDS has killed in
twenty-five years. Still, that death toll represents less than 5 per-
cent of the people who were infected with the 1918 flu virus. H5N1
has officially killed nearly two-thirds of its human victims.
Cramming tens of thousands of chickens bred to be almost ge-
netically identical into massive, filthy sheds to stand and lie beak-
to-beak in their own waste is a recipe for increasing the virulence
and transmission of this virus. “You have to say,” concluded virolo-
gist Earl Brown, a specialist in the evolution of influenza viruses,
“that high-intensity chicken rearing is a perfect environment for
generating virulent avian flu virus.”
In October 2005, the United Nations issued a press release:
