independentsciencenews--2020-04-14--COVID-19: A wake-up call for biosafety

COVID-19: A wake-up call for biosafety

Like many of our readers , we may be sheltering-in-place , but please don ’ t think we ’ re taking our eye off the ball .
Although other issues may not seem so important at the moment , the COVID-19 virus will subside one day , yet we will still be facing huge threats such as the so-called “ extinction crisis ” ( the collapse of biodiversity ) and the failure to take biosafety seriously .
Interestingly , the pandemic is making many people more alert to exactly these kinds of issues .
Take , for instance , biosafety @ @ @ @ @ @ @ COVID-19 has not been deliberately genetically engineered and released as a bioweapon , the possibility that it emerged from a research laboratory has not been ruled out .
For instance , Rutgers University ’ s Prof Richard Ebright , a biosecurity expert who has been speaking out on biosafety issues for nearly 20 years , thinks that the COVID-19 pandemic could have started as an accidental release from a lab , such as one of the two known to have been studying bat coronaviruses in Wuhan , China , where the new coronavirus @ @ @ @ @ @ @ professor of cell biology and anatomy at New York Medical College in Valhalla , New York , editor-in-chief of the journal Biological Theory , and co-author of Biotech Juggernaut , adds crucial historical context that shows exploring whether COVID-19 could have been genetically engineered should not be dismissed as a subject fit only for conspiracy theorists .
He points out that the genetic engineering of coronaviruses has been going on for a long time .
According to Newman , “ Even most biologists are not aware that virologists have been experimentally recombining and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ decade to study their mechanisms of pathogenicity.
” Indeed , Newman points to papers on engineering coronaviruses that go back a full 20 years .
Others are flagging up how the proliferation of genetic engineering technologies like CRISPR could threaten us with pandemics that are even more deadly than COVID-19 .
The current pandemic has also fuelled interest in the work of Toby Ord , Senior Research Fellow at Oxford ’ s Future of Humanity Institute .
In his just published book The Precipice , Ord warns that global pandemics triggered by research @ @ @ @ @ @ @ biggest existential threats that humanity faces .
He points to the fact that even the highest biosafety level ( BSL-4 ) labs , working on live pathogens that are known to threaten global harm , have a poor track record for biosecurity .
This includes research involving strains of these pathogens that are deliberately designed to pose even more danger – for example , through enhanced transmissibility .
“ With current BSL-4 labs , ” Ord writes , “ an escape of a pandemic pathogen is only a matter of time.
” In @ @ @ @ @ @ @ out , are known to have been studied in much lower biosafety level ( BSL-2 ) labs .
This includes the bat coronaviruses studied at labs in and around Wuhan .
“ As a result , ” Ebright says , “ bat coronaviruses at Wuhan [ Center for Disease Control ] and Wuhan Institute of Virology routinely were collected and studied at BSL-2 , which provides only minimal protections against infection of lab workers.
” In addition to accidents , the broad distribution and relatively low cost of gene-editing techniques like CRISPR give @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has been tracking and calculating man-made threats to our existence since 1947 when it was established by Albert Einstein , with Robert Oppenheimer as the first chair .
The Bulletin lists the affordability , availability and rapid spread of genetic engineering and synthetic biology technologies as among the reasons why at the start of 2020 they set their iconic Doomsday Clock at closer to disaster than ever in its history .
The current collection of vast sets of health related and genomic data , they say , only @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of highly effective biological weapons .
In their view , it is now “ 100 seconds to midnight ” and humanity is in its greatest moment of peril .
Toby Ord similarly sees humanity as now traversing a precipice .
And he considers the risks from emerging technologies as the highest existential threats we face .
He places them far above not just natural risks , like massive meteor strikes or huge volcanic eruptions , but man-made ones like nuclear war and climate change .
They are the principal reason Ord thinks humanity @ @ @ @ @ @ @ existential catastrophe before the end of this century , making our chances of survival equivalent to those of a player of Russian roulette .
Ord ’ s concerns about gene editing being used to genetically modify a pathogen are shared by the US intelligence community .
In fact , in 2016 the technique was added to the list of “ weapons of mass destruction and proliferation ” by the top US intelligence official for this very reason .
The late Stephen Hawking also thought the genetic engineering of viruses had created the risk @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
And by “ lethal ” , he meant not just as deadly as the current pandemic , but something that could make the planet completely uninhabitable for humans .
Like Hawking , Ord is no technophobe .
Indeed , Ord wants above all things to protect the technological progress humanity has made and is capable of making .
But in order to do that , he says , we need to act with maturity .
Care should be our watchword and we should guard against haste .
Our best grand strategy is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on the potential dangers .
Otherwise , the rush to develop technologies could be not just counterproductive , but totally disastrous .
Yet far from governments becoming more alert to the dangers from emerging technologies , complacency has , if anything , been growing .
Australia , for instance , is among the governments leading the charge on deregulating a number of gene-editing techniques , including CRISPR – meaning anyone can use them to genetically modify plants , animals or microbes with zero regulatory oversight .
This is ironic , given that the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to a lethal virus occurred in an Australian lab , and even led to calls for an urgent strengthening of the Biological Weapons Convention .
Again , risks could arise from both bad actors and accidents , with CRISPR proving far less precise and reliable than advertised .
To up the stakes still further , also being worked on are CRISPR-based gene drives that aim to eliminate whole species of natural organisms in the wild or replace them with genetically engineered versions .
COVID-19 can be seen as a wake-up call .
Richard @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , in declaring the response to the coronavirus “ the greatest global science policy failure in a generation ” , writes , “ If COVID-19 eventually imbues human beings with some humility , it ’ s possible that we will , after all , be receptive to the lessons of this lethal pandemic.
” “ But , ” he warns , “ perhaps we will sink back into our culture of complacent exceptionalism and await the next plague that will surely arrive .
To go by recent history , that moment will come @ @ @ @ @ @ @ plague could well be genetically engineered and/or have come out of a laboratory .
If this article was useful to you please consider sharing it with your networks .

by Jonathan Matthews of GMWatch
Like many of our readers, we may be sheltering-in-place, but please don’t think we’re taking our eye off the ball. Although other issues may not seem so important at the moment, the COVID-19 virus will subside one day, yet we will still be facing huge threats such as the so-called “extinction crisis” (the collapse of biodiversity) and the failure to take biosafety seriously. Interestingly, the pandemic is making many people more alert to exactly these kinds of issues.
Take, for instance, biosafety. While some experts have stated that COVID-19 has not been deliberately genetically engineered and released as a bioweapon, the possibility that it emerged from a research laboratory has not been ruled out.
For instance, Rutgers University’s Prof Richard Ebright, a biosecurity expert who has been speaking out on biosafety issues for nearly 20 years, thinks that the COVID-19 pandemic could have started as an accidental release from a lab, such as one of the two known to have been studying bat coronaviruses in Wuhan, China, where the new coronavirus first emerged.
And Stuart Newman, professor of cell biology and anatomy at New York Medical College in Valhalla, New York, editor-in-chief of the journal Biological Theory, and co-author of Biotech Juggernaut, adds crucial historical context that shows exploring whether COVID-19 could have been genetically engineered should not be dismissed as a subject fit only for conspiracy theorists.
He points out that the genetic engineering of coronaviruses has been going on for a long time. According to Newman, “Even most biologists are not aware that virologists have been experimentally recombining and genetically modifying coronaviruses for more than a decade to study their mechanisms of pathogenicity.” Indeed, Newman points to papers on engineering coronaviruses that go back a full 20 years.
Others are flagging up how the proliferation of genetic engineering technologies like CRISPR could threaten us with pandemics that are even more deadly than COVID-19.
The current pandemic has also fuelled interest in the work of Toby Ord, Senior Research Fellow at Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute. In his just published book The Precipice, Ord warns that global pandemics triggered by research on viruses pose one of the two biggest existential threats that humanity faces. He points to the fact that even the highest biosafety level (BSL-4) labs, working on live pathogens that are known to threaten global harm, have a poor track record for biosecurity. This includes research involving strains of these pathogens that are deliberately designed to pose even more danger – for example, through enhanced transmissibility. “With current BSL-4 labs,” Ord writes, “an escape of a pandemic pathogen is only a matter of time.”
In fact, coronaviruses, Prof Ebright points out, are known to have been studied in much lower biosafety level (BSL-2) labs. This includes the bat coronaviruses studied at labs in and around Wuhan. “As a result,” Ebright says, “bat coronaviruses at Wuhan [Center for Disease Control] and Wuhan Institute of Virology routinely were collected and studied at BSL-2, which provides only minimal protections against infection of lab workers.”
In addition to accidents, the broad distribution and relatively low cost of gene-editing techniques like CRISPR give growing opportunities for bad actors. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has been tracking and calculating man-made threats to our existence since 1947 when it was established by Albert Einstein, with Robert Oppenheimer as the first chair. The Bulletin lists the affordability, availability and rapid spread of genetic engineering and synthetic biology technologies as among the reasons why at the start of 2020 they set their iconic Doomsday Clock at closer to disaster than ever in its history. The current collection of vast sets of health related and genomic data, they say, only adds to the danger of the development of highly effective biological weapons.
In their view, it is now “100 seconds to midnight” and humanity is in its greatest moment of peril.
Toby Ord similarly sees humanity as now traversing a precipice. And he considers the risks from emerging technologies as the highest existential threats we face. He places them far above not just natural risks, like massive meteor strikes or huge volcanic eruptions, but man-made ones like nuclear war and climate change. They are the principal reason Ord thinks humanity faces a 1 in 6 chance of existential catastrophe before the end of this century, making our chances of survival equivalent to those of a player of Russian roulette.
Ord’s concerns about gene editing being used to genetically modify a pathogen are shared by the US intelligence community. In fact, in 2016 the technique was added to the list of “weapons of mass destruction and proliferation” by the top US intelligence official for this very reason. The late Stephen Hawking also thought the genetic engineering of viruses had created the risk of a lethal “own goal”. And by “lethal”, he meant not just as deadly as the current pandemic, but something that could make the planet completely uninhabitable for humans.
Like Hawking, Ord is no technophobe. Indeed, Ord wants above all things to protect the technological progress humanity has made and is capable of making. But in order to do that, he says, we need to act with maturity. Care should be our watchword and we should guard against haste. Our best grand strategy is one marked by prudence and careful reflection on the potential dangers. Otherwise, the rush to develop technologies could be not just counterproductive, but totally disastrous.
Yet far from governments becoming more alert to the dangers from emerging technologies, complacency has, if anything, been growing. Australia, for instance, is among the governments leading the charge on deregulating a number of gene-editing techniques, including CRISPR – meaning anyone can use them to genetically modify plants, animals or microbes with zero regulatory oversight. This is ironic, given that the most striking case of genetic engineering leading to a lethal virus occurred in an Australian lab, and even led to calls for an urgent strengthening of the Biological Weapons Convention.
Again, risks could arise from both bad actors and accidents, with CRISPR proving far less precise and reliable than advertised.
To up the stakes still further, also being worked on are CRISPR-based gene drives that aim to eliminate whole species of natural organisms in the wild or replace them with genetically engineered versions.
COVID-19 can be seen as a wake-up call. Richard Horton, the editor-in-chief of The Lancet, in declaring the response to the coronavirus “the greatest global science policy failure in a generation”, writes, “If COVID-19 eventually imbues human beings with some humility, it’s possible that we will, after all, be receptive to the lessons of this lethal pandemic.”
“But,” he warns, “perhaps we will sink back into our culture of complacent exceptionalism and await the next plague that will surely arrive. To go by recent history, that moment will come sooner than we think.”
And that plague could well be genetically engineered and/or have come out of a laboratory.
(This article appeared originally in GMWatch)
If this article was useful to you please consider sharing it with your networks.


independentsciencenews--2020-02-25--Researchers Are Substantially Undercounting Gene-Editing Errors, Concludes a New Paper

The standard gene-editing tool , CRISPR-Cas9 , frequently produces a type of DNA mutation that ordinary genetic analysis misses , claims new research published in the journal Science Advances .
In describing these findings the researchers called such oversights “ serious pitfalls ” of gene editing ( Skryabin et al.
, 2020 ) .
In all , the new results suggest that gene-editing is more error-prone than thought and , further , that identifying and discarding defective and unwanted outcomes is not as easy as generally supposed .
Derived originally from the bacterium streptococcus pyogenes , CRISPR-Cas9 is a DNA @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for lustered egularly nterspaced hort alindromic epeats and refers to the RNA molecule that is the targeting component of the system .
This CRISPR RNA is sometimes also referred to as the guide RNA .
The Cas9 component is a nuclease , that is , an enzyme that cuts DNA .
Thus , in the editing process , the Cas9 enzyme is guided to the intended cut site by the CRISPR RNA .
The whole assembly is often just called CRISPR .
Other gene-editing methods exist ( e.g .
Zn Finger , TALENs @ @ @ @ @ @ @ flexibility of its RNA targeting mechanism , CRISPR in particular has been the subject of enormous excitement in the biotech and agricultural research sectors .
CRISPR has mostly been used to create genetic mutations or to insert foreign DNA at desired locations in a genome .
Nevertheless , other applications , like gene drives , have also been mooted .
Despite the excitement , as Friends of the Earth has summarised , just a tiny handful of commercial gene-edited products can be found on the market .
For many uses , however , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a great deal of research is currently oriented towards fixing this defect .
Much of CRISPR ’ s lack of precision derives from the fact that , though it is called ‘ editing ’ , CRISPR and related techniques are cutting enzymes only .
They have no DNA repair function .
This means that when repairs are made to the DNA at the cut site ( and the cut must be repaired for the cell to survive ) they are largely out of the control of the experimenter .
Ten independent editing events @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the same location in the genome .
Thus , at a very basic level , each mutation created at the target site is likely to be unique .
Even to the extent , as we reported , that DNA from other species may end up being unexpectedly incorporated into the edited genome .
To add to this uncertainty , different genome locations , different cell types , different species , and different versions of CRISPR , can all influence the kinds of genetic alteration found at the target site .
In some applications–primarily @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is not necessarily a major problem .
In crop breeding , for example , cells or organisms containing undesirable alterations or off-target mutations can , in theory , be detected and discarded .
But in many applications , primarily in medicine and commercial products , only more-or-less-complete precision is acceptable , for reasons of safety .
Inaccurate editing of human cells in an early gene therapy trial once resulted in 2 of 11 treated children developing leukaemia due to off-target effects and led to the trial being shut down .
The question of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ could or would adequately detect and discard undesirable mutations is a live concern .
Recombinetics is a commercial company that , in 2016 , created a hornless cow it claimed was the intended result of a precise gene edit .
But FDA researchers who examined the company ’ s own DNA sequence data were subsequently able to show that both of the independently edited calves contained , at the site of the edit , entire antibiotic resistance genes ( Norris et al.
, 2020 ) .
By the time FDA was able to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the calves where already incorporated into a Brazilian breeding program .
This breeding program has now been abandoned .
The new research , published on Feb 12th , directly addresses whether CRISPR researchers can , in fact , detect aberrant edits .
The German and Chinese researchers edited mouse oocytes ( i.e .
embryos ) with the added step ( compared to simple cutting ) of adding a stretch of DNA ( the donor DNA ) which they hoped would become integrated at the cut site .
What they unexpectedly found , however @ @ @ @ @ @ @ proportion of target sites , complex insertions of the desired DNA occurred .
Rather than simply integrating single copies of the donor DNA into the cut site , DNA integrations were commonly head-to-tail arrangements of multiple copies .
As the paper states : By ‘ common ’ the researchers meant that , in one experiment , among 34 edited mice , six contained head-to-tail insertions .
In other experiments 30 of 49 mice contained head-to-tail insertions .
In other words , complex and aberrant DNA insertions were common findings .
Importantly , they @ @ @ @ @ @ @ seems to be true regardless of what DNA was inserted or which stretch of the genome it was inserted into .
This in itself is a very significant finding .
Even more notable , however , was that these complex genetic rearrangements were rarely detected by standard analytical methods .
The authors called this finding “ disturbing ” .
Undetected , such aberrant events “ would undermine the validity of studies ” according to the authors .
In experimental settings this is undoubtedly true .
But for the general public a more important @ @ @ @ @ @ @ hoping to bring genome-edited products rapidly ( and without regulatory scrutiny ) to the market , this research represents a significant cautionary tale ; especially since the authors speculate that their results probably apply equally to other editing methods , such as TALENs and Zn Finger nucleases .
If this article was useful to you please consider sharing it with your networks .

by Jonathan Latham, PhD
The standard gene-editing tool, CRISPR-Cas9, frequently produces a type of DNA mutation that ordinary genetic analysis misses, claims new research published in the journal Science Advances. In describing these findings the researchers called such oversights “serious pitfalls” of gene editing (Skryabin et al., 2020). In all, the new results suggest that gene-editing is more error-prone than thought and, further, that identifying and discarding defective and unwanted outcomes is not as easy as generally supposed.
Derived originally from the bacterium streptococcus pyogenes, CRISPR-Cas9 is a DNA cutting and targeting system. CRISPR stands for c lustered r egularly i nterspaced s hort p alindromic r epeats and refers to the RNA molecule that is the targeting component of the system. This CRISPR RNA is sometimes also referred to as the guide RNA. The Cas9 component is a nuclease, that is, an enzyme that cuts DNA. Thus, in the editing process, the Cas9 enzyme is guided to the intended cut site by the CRISPR RNA. The whole assembly is often just called CRISPR.
Other gene-editing methods exist (e.g. Zn Finger, TALENs). However, because of the flexibility of its RNA targeting mechanism, CRISPR in particular has been the subject of enormous excitement in the biotech and agricultural research sectors.
CRISPR has mostly been used to create genetic mutations or to insert foreign DNA at desired locations in a genome. Nevertheless, other applications, like gene drives, have also been mooted. Despite the excitement, as Friends of the Earth has summarised, just a tiny handful of commercial gene-edited products can be found on the market.
For many uses, however, gene-editing with CRISPR is insufficiently precise and a great deal of research is currently oriented towards fixing this defect.
Much of CRISPR’s lack of precision derives from the fact that, though it is called ‘editing’, CRISPR and related techniques are cutting enzymes only. They have no DNA repair function. This means that when repairs are made to the DNA at the cut site (and the cut must be repaired for the cell to survive) they are largely out of the control of the experimenter. Ten independent editing events will therefore give ten different mutations at the same location in the genome.
Thus, at a very basic level, each mutation created at the target site is likely to be unique. Even to the extent, as we reported, that DNA from other species may end up being unexpectedly incorporated into the edited genome.
To add to this uncertainty, different genome locations, different cell types, different species, and different versions of CRISPR, can all influence the kinds of genetic alteration found at the target site.
In some applications–primarily basic research–lack of precision of this kind is not necessarily a major problem. In crop breeding, for example, cells or organisms containing undesirable alterations or off-target mutations can, in theory, be detected and discarded.
But in many applications, primarily in medicine and commercial products, only more-or-less-complete precision is acceptable, for reasons of safety. Inaccurate editing of human cells in an early gene therapy trial once resulted in 2 of 11 treated children developing leukaemia due to off-target effects and led to the trial being shut down.
The question of whether researchers and/or developers of edited organisms could or would adequately detect and discard undesirable mutations is a live concern. Recombinetics is a commercial company that, in 2016, created a hornless cow it claimed was the intended result of a precise gene edit. But FDA researchers who examined the company’s own DNA sequence data were subsequently able to show that both of the independently edited calves contained, at the site of the edit, entire antibiotic resistance genes (Norris et al., 2020).
By the time FDA was able to show this, however, offspring of the calves where already incorporated into a Brazilian breeding program. This breeding program has now been abandoned.
The new research, published on Feb 12th, directly addresses whether CRISPR researchers can, in fact, detect aberrant edits.
The German and Chinese researchers edited mouse oocytes (i.e. embryos) with the added step (compared to simple cutting) of adding a stretch of DNA (the donor DNA) which they hoped would become integrated at the cut site.
What they unexpectedly found, however, is that, at a high proportion of target sites, complex insertions of the desired DNA occurred. Rather than simply integrating single copies of the donor DNA into the cut site, DNA integrations were commonly head-to-tail arrangements of multiple copies. As the paper states:
“Overall, we conclude that the repetitive head-to-tail integration of the donor DNA template is a common by-product of the CRISPR-Cas9-mediated HDR-based genome editing process, regardless of the donor DNA template size, sequence composition, or strandedness of the template (dsDNA or ssDNA).” [editor’s note: ds=double stranded; ss=single stranded]
By ‘common’ the researchers meant that, in one experiment, among 34 edited mice, six contained head-to-tail insertions. In other experiments 30 of 49 mice contained head-to-tail insertions.
In other words, complex and aberrant DNA insertions were common findings. Importantly, they occurred in multiple experiments, meaning this seems to be true regardless of what DNA was inserted or which stretch of the genome it was inserted into. This in itself is a very significant finding.
Even more notable, however, was that these complex genetic rearrangements were rarely detected by standard analytical methods. The authors called this finding “disturbing”.
They wrote:
“conventionally applied PCR analysis, in most cases, failed to identify these multiple integration events, which led to a high rate of falsely claimed precisely edited alleles.”
Undetected, such aberrant events “would undermine the validity of studies” according to the authors.
In experimental settings this is undoubtedly true. But for the general public a more important implication exists. With companies and biohackers hoping to bring genome-edited products rapidly (and without regulatory scrutiny) to the market, this research represents a significant cautionary tale; especially since the authors speculate that their results probably apply equally to other editing methods, such as TALENs and Zn Finger nucleases.
References
Boris V. Skryabin, Delf-Magnus Kummerfeld, Leonid Gubar, Birte Seeger, Helena Kaiser et al. (2020) Pervasive head-to-tail insertions of DNA templates mask desired CRISPR-Cas9–mediated genome editing events. Science Advances 6 eaax2941 DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aax2941
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independentsciencenews--2020-02-17--We Need to Connect the 2019-nCoV Coronavirus to Agriculture

By Rob Wallace , PhD A new deadly coronavirus 2019-nCoV , related to SARS and MERS and apparently originating in live animal markets in Wuhan , China , is starting to spread worldwide .
Chinese authorities have reported 5974 cases nationwide , 1000 of them severe .
With infections in nearly every province , authorities warned 2019-nCoV appears to be spreading fast out of its epicenter .
The virus ’ s basic reproduction number , a measure of the number of new cases per infection given no cap on available susceptibles , is clocking in at a healthy 3.11 .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ momentum , a control campaign must stop up to 75 % of new infections to reverse the outbreak .
The modeling team estimates there are presently over 21,000 cases , reported or not , in Wuhan alone .
Full-genome sequences of the virus meanwhile show few differences between the samples isolated across China .
Slower spread for such a fast-evolving RNA virus would be marked by mutations accumulating place-to-place .
The coronavirus is starting to open up theaters overseas .
Travelers with 2019-nCoV have been treated in Australia , France , Hong Kong @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Vietnam , Singapore , South Korea , Taiwan , Thailand , and the United States .
Local outbreaks are now starting up within sink countries .
As the infection is characterized by human-to-human transmission and an apparent two-week incubation period before the sickness hits , the infection will likely continue to spread across the globe .
Whether it ’ ll be Wuhan everywhere remains an open question .
The virus ’ s final penetrance worldwide will depend on the difference between the rate of infection and the rate of removing infections by recovery @ @ @ @ @ @ @ far exceeds removal , then the total population infected may approach the whole of humanity .
That outcome , however , would likely be marked by large geographic variation brought about by a combination of dead chance and the differences in how countries responded to their outbreak .
Pandemic skeptics aren ’ t so sure of such a scenario .
Far fewer patients have been infected and killed by 2019-nCoV than even the typical seasonal influenza .
But the mistake here is in confusing a moment early in an outbreak for a virus @ @ @ @ @ @ @ dynamic .
Yes , some burn out , including , maybe , 2019-nCoV .
It takes the right evolutionary draw and a little luck to beat out chance extirpation .
Sometimes enough hosts don ’ t line up to keep transmission going .
Other outbreaks explode .
Those that make it on the world stage can be game changers , even if they eventually die out .
They upend the everyday routines of even a world already in tumult or at war .
The deadliness of any potential pandemic strain is the meat @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Should the virus prove less infectious or deadly than initially thought , civilization goes on , however many people are killed .
The H1N1 ( 2009 ) influenza outbreak that worried so many a decade-plus ago proved less virulent than it first seemed .
But even that strain penetrated the global population , and quietly killed patients , at magnitudes far beyond these first follow-up dismissals .
H1N1 ( 2009 ) killed as many as 579,000 people its first year , producing complications in fifteen times more cases than initially projected from lab @ @ @ @ @ @ @ found in humanity ’ s unprecedented connectivity .
H1N1 ( 2009 ) crossed the Pacific Ocean in nine days , superseding predictions by the most sophisticated models of the global travel network by months .
Airline data show a tenfold increase in travel in China just since the SARS epidemic .
Under such widespread percolation , low mortality for a large number of infections can still cause a large number of deaths .
If four billion people are infected at a mortality rate of only 2 % , a death rate less than @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , eighty million people are killed .
And unlike for seasonal influenza , we have neither herd immunity , nor a vaccine to slow it down .
Even speeded-up development will at best take three months to produce a vaccine for 2019-nCoV , assuming it even works .
Scientists successfully produced a vaccine for the H5N2 avian influenza only after the U.S. outbreak ended .
A critical epidemiological parameter will be the relationship between infectivity and when those infected express symptoms .
SARS and MERS proved infectious only upon symptoms .
If this @ @ @ @ @ @ @ be in relatively good shape , all things considered .
Even without a vaccine or tailored antivirals , we can immediately quarantine the suddenly sick , breaking chains of transmission with nineteenth-century public health .
Sunday , however , China ’ s health minister Ma Xiaowei stunned the world announcing that 2019-nCoV had expressed infectivity before symptoms .
It ’ s such a turnabout that infuriated U.S. epidemiologists are demanding access to the data showing the new infectivity .
The shock implies researchers stateside expect the virus couldn ’ t possibly be able @ @ @ @ @ @ @ imagine as some public health archetype .
If the new infection life history holds true , health authorities aren ’ t going to be able to use symptoms to identify newly active cases .
These unknowns—the exact source , infectivity , penetrance , and possible treatments—together explain why epidemiologists and public health officials are worried about 2019-nCoV .
Unlike the seasonal influenzas cited by pandemic skeptics , the uncertainty rattles practitioners .
It is the nature of the job , to worry , yes .
Worry is built into the very probabilities and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ trade .
The damage in failing to prepare for an outbreak that proves deadly far exceeds that from the embarrassment of preparing for an outbreak that fails to live up to the hype .
But in an era celebrating austerity , few jurisdictions wish to pay for a disaster that is no guarantee , whatever the collateral benefits of precaution or , on the other end of outcomes , the devastating losses associated with a bad gamble .
The choice how to respond is often entirely out of epidemiologist hands anyway .
The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ juggle multiple and often contrary agendas .
Stopping even a deadly outbreak isn ’ t always treated as the most important objective .
While authorities stumble about figuring out what to do , the scale of impact can suddenly engage in escape velocity .
As 2019-nCoV itself demonstrated moving from a single food market to the world stage in a month , the numbers can ramp up so far and fast that an epidemiologist ’ s best effort , their raison d ’ être , is dealt a lethal blow by facts on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ this disease round have skipped across worry , disappointment , and impatience .
I ’ m an evolutionary biologist and public health phylogeographer who has worked on various aspects of these new pandemics for twenty-five years , much of my adult life .
As I ’ ve written elsewhere , with the help of many others , I have tried parlaying a growing understanding of these pathogens , from the genetic sequences of my initial studies up through economic geographies of land use , the political economy of global agriculture , and the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a soul .
As my social media chimed with queries about 2019-nCoV , my immediate response bordered on pique and exhaustion .
What , pray , do you wish me to say ?
What do you want me to do about this ?
In dispensing advice personal and professional to legitimately worried friends and colleagues , I made some wrong calls .
To one farmer friend ’ s query about traveling abroad , I advised a surgeon ’ s mask , washing hands before all meals , and stop fucking livestock , bro @ @ @ @ @ @ @ stress , but his earnest reply , “ Stop fucking livestock ?
” showed I had missed my mark .
Not a good look on my part at all .
I apologized .
He laughed about it later .
It ’ s an occupational hazard .
There is the danger of an existential dread that arises from the political inertia epidemiologists must square off with in preparing the world for a nigh-on irresistible pandemic their constituencies pretend is no bother until it ’ s too late .
If 2019-nCoV is indeed the Big @ @ @ @ @ @ @ yet if that ’ s the case , there is almost nothing to be done at this point .
All we can do is batten down the public health hatches and hope the virus kills only a small part of the world ’ s population instead of 90 % .
Clearly humanity shouldn ’ t start reacting to a pandemic when it ’ s already underway .
It ’ s a total dereliction of any notion of forward-thinking theory or practice .
And leaders and their learned supporters worldwide identify themselves as Prometheans @ @ @ @ @ @ @ trainspotted novel strains of African swine fever , Campylobacter , Cryptosporidium , Cyclospora , Ebola , E. coli O157 : H7 , foot-and-mouth disease , hepatitis E , Listeria , Nipah virus , Q fever , Salmonella , Vibrio , Yersinia , Zika , and a variety of novel inﬂuenza A variants , including H1N1 ( 2009 ) , H1N2v , H3N2v , H5N1 , H5N2 , H5Nx , H6N1 , H7N1 , H7N3 , H7N7 , H7N9 , and H9N2 .
And near-nothing real was done about any of them .
Authorities @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s reversal and immediately took the next roll of the epidemiological dice , risking snake eyes of maximum virulence and transmissibility .
That approach suffers more than a failure of foresight or nerve .
However necessary , emergency interventions cleaning up each of these messes can make matters worse .
You see , sources of intervention compete .
And , as my colleagues and I argue , emergency criteria are deployed as impositions in Gramscian hegemony to keep us from talking about structural interventions around power and production .
Because , don @ @ @ @ @ @ @ re warned , IT ’ S AN EMERGENCY RIGHT NOW !
Atop this game of keep away , the failure to address structural problems can render these very emergency interventions ineffectual .
The Allee threshold that prophylaxes and quarantine aim to push pathogen populations below—so that infections may burn out on their own unable to find new susceptibles—is set by structural causes .
As our team wrote about the Ebola outbreak in West Africa : Despite now with both an effective vaccine and antivirals , Ebola is presently undergoing its longest recorded outbreak @ @ @ @ @ @ @ What got lost along the way ?
Where is our biomedical God now ?
Blaming the Congolese to cover up this failure is an exercise in colonial displacement , washing imperialism ’ s hands of decades of structural adjustment and regime change in the global North ’ s favor .
Saying there ’ s nothing we can do isn ’ t quite right either , however , even as the complaint about reacting only upon a new disease ’ s attack still stands .
Within any one locale , there is a left @ @ @ @ @ @ @ neighborhood brigades in mutual aid , demanding any vaccine and antivirals developed be made available at no cost to everyone here and abroad , pirating antivirals and medical supplies , and securing unemployment and healthcare coverage as the economy tanks during the outbreak .
But that way of thinking and organizing , an integral part of the left ’ s legacy , appears to have left the building for more performative ( and discursive ) configurations online .
The reactionary bent to disease control left and right has since pivoted me to assisting @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Let ’ s stop the outbreaks we can ’ t handle from emerging in the first place .
At this point in my career , with the structural pacing the emergencies , I generally write about infectious diseases in only tangential terms .
Structural causes of disease are themselves a source of debate .
For one , questions remain as to 2019-nCoV ’ s origins .
Much initial attention has been placed on a particular exotic food market in Wuhan , with an orientalist preoccupation with strange and unsavory diets , representing both @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is destroying and a revolting source of dangerous disease : Said snakes are brandished as both signifier and signified , a literal source of 2019-nCoV that also harkens to a paradise lost and original sin from a serpent ’ s maw .
There is epidemiological evidence in the hypothesis ’ s favor .
Thirty-three of 585 samples at the Wuhan market were found positive for 2019-nCoV , with 31 at the west end of the market where wildlife trading was concentrated .
On the other hand , only 41 % of these positive @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the wildlife were housed .
A quarter of the original infectees never visited the Wuhan market or appeared directly exposed .
The earliest case was identified before the market was hit .
Other infected marketers trafficked in hog alone , a livestock species that expresses a common vulnerable molecular receptor , leading one team to hypothesize hog as the putative source for the new coronavirus .
Atop African swine fever , which has killed as many as half of China ’ s hog this past year , the latter possibility would represent quite @ @ @ @ @ @ @ not unheard of , even folding into an intimate reciprocal activation , wherein proteins of each pathogen catalyze each other , facilitating new clinical courses and transmission dynamics for both diseases .
At the same time , Western Sinophobia doesn ’ t absolve Chinese public health .
Certainly the anger and disappointment the Chinese public has directed at local and federal authorities for their slow reaction to 2019-nCoV can ’ t be spun as weaponized xenophobia .
And in our wise efforts to keep our foot out of that trap , we may @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Setting aside the culture war , wet markets and exotic food are staples in China , as is now industrial production , juxtaposed alongside each other since economic liberalization post-Mao .
Indeed , the two food modes may be integrated by way of land use .
Expanding industrial production may push increasingly capitalized wild foods deeper into the last of the primary landscape , dredging out a wider variety of potentially protopandemic pathogens .
Peri-urban loops of growing extent and population density may increase the interface ( and spillover ) between wild @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Worldwide , even the wildest subsistence species are being roped into ag value chains : among them ostriches , porcupine , crocodiles , fruit bats , and the palm civet , whose partially digested berries now supply the world ’ s most expensive coffee bean .
Some wild species are making it onto forks before they are even scientifically identified , including one new short-nosed dogfish found in a Taiwanese market .
All are increasingly treated as food commodities .
As nature is stripped place-by-place , species-by-species , what ’ s left over @ @ @ @ @ @ @ anthropologist Lyle Fearnley pointed out that farmers in China repeatedly manipulate the distinction between wildness and domesticity as an economic signifier , producing new meanings and values attached to their animals , including in response to the very epidemiological alerts issued around their trade .
A Marxist might push back that these signifiers emerge out of a context that extends well beyond smallholder control and out onto global circuits of capital .
So while the distinction between factory farms and wet markets isn ’ t unimportant , we may miss their similarities ( @ @ @ @ @ @ @ bleed together by a number of other mechanisms .
Many a smallholder worldwide , including in China , is in actuality a contractor , growing out day-old poultry , for instance , for industrial processing .
So on a contractor ’ s smallholding along the forest edge , a food animal may catch a pathogen before being shipped back to a processing plant on the outer ring of a major city .
Spreading factory farms meanwhile may force increasingly corporatized wild foods companies to trawl deeper into the forest , increasing the likelihood @ @ @ @ @ @ @ while reducing the kind of environmental complexity with which the forest disrupts transmission chains .
Capital weaponizes the resulting disease investigations .
Blaming smallholders is now a standard agribusiness crisis management practice , but clearly diseases are a matter of systems of production over time and space and mode , not just specific actors between whom we can juggle blame .
As a class , the coronaviruses appear to straddle these distinctions .
While SARS and 2019-nCoV appeared to have emerged out of wet markets—possible pigs aside—MERS , the other deadly coronavirus , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sector in the Middle East .
It ’ s a path to virulence largely left out of broader scientific discussion about these viruses .
It should change how we think about them .
I would recommend we err on the side of viewing disease causality and intervention beyond the biomedical or even ecohealth object and out into the field of ecosocial relationships .
Other ethoses see a different way out .
Some researchers recommend we genetically engineer poultry and livestock to be resistant to these diseases .
They leave out whether that would @ @ @ @ @ @ @ what would now be asymptomatic food animals before spilling over into decidedly unengineered humans .
Again turning back the clock , a source of my pique , nine years ago I wrote about what efforts at genetically engineering out pathogens miss as matters of first principle : One source of vexation is the dimensionality of the problem .
There is even among mainstream scholars a dawning realization influenza is more than mere virion or infection ; that it respects little of disciplinary boundaries ( and business plans ) in both their form and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ at one level of biocultural organization to solve problems they face at other levels , including the molecular .
Agribusiness ever turns us toward a techno-utopian future to keep us in a past bounded by capitalist relations .
We are spun round and round the very commodity tracks selecting for new diseases in the first place .
The secret thrill ( and open terror ) epidemiologists feel in an outbreak is nothing more than defeat disguised as heroism .
Almost the entirety of the profession is presently organized around post-hoc duties , much @ @ @ @ @ @ @ following behind the elephants at a circus .
Under the neoliberal program , epidemiologists and public health units are funded to clean up the system ’ s mess , while rationalizing even the worst practices that lead to many a deadly pandemic ’ s emergence .
In a commentary on the new coronavirus , one Simon Reid , a professor of communicable disease control at the University of Queensland , instantiates the resulting incoherence .
Reid pings from topic to topic , failing to weave a whole out of his technicist observations .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ matter of incompetence or malicious intent upon Reid ’ s part .
It is more a matter of the contradictory obligations of the neoliberal university .
U.S. leftists recently joined swords over the existence of the professional-managerial class .
Jacobin social democrats rail at the capitalist PMC they angle to join in a Sanders administration , while tankies claim managers are proletarian too .
I ’ ll sidestep the metaphysical debate—how many PMC can dance on an epipen ?
—only to observe that whether the PMC theoretically exists in epidemiology , I ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
They live !
Reid and other institutional epidemiologists are on the hook for cleaning up diseases of neoliberal origins—yes , including out of China—while meting out comforting platitudes that the system that pays them works .
It ’ s a double bind many practitioners choose to live with , nay , prosper from , even should the resulting epidemiologies threaten millions .
Reid here kinda gets the food system and conservation parts of the explanation for 2019-nCoV ( and many of its celebrity forerunners out of the series of epidemiological reality shows @ @ @ @ @ @ @ But in introducing this protopandemic , he propositions , to paraphrase , that “ This utter horror has a saving grace—hooray !
” And it is that “ China has been a source of repeated outbreaks , but it , and a WHO now owned by philanthrocapitalism , conducts exemplary biocontrol.
” We can reject Sinophobia , offer material support , and still well remember China covered up the SARS outbreak in 2003 .
Beijing suppressed media and public health reports , allowing that coronavirus to splatter across its own country .
Medical @ @ @ @ @ @ @ didn ’ t know what their patients were suddenly showing up with at the ER .
SARS eventually spread across multiple countries as far as Canada and was barely driven to extirpation .
The new century has meanwhile been marked by China ’ s failure or refusal to unpack its near-perfect storm of rice , duck , and industrial poultry and hog production driving multiple novel strains of influenza .
It is treated as a price for prosperity .
This is no Chinese exceptionalism , however .
The U.S. and Europe have served @ @ @ @ @ @ @ well , recently H5N2 and H5Nx , and their multinationals and neocolonial proxies drove the emergence of Ebola in West Africa and Zika in Brazil .
U.S. public health officials covered for agribusiness during the H1N1 ( 2009 ) and H5N2 outbreaks .
Perhaps then we should refrain from choosing between one of two cycles of capital accumulation : the end of the American cycle or the start of the Chinese one ( or , as Reid appears to do , both ) .
At the risk of accusations of third campism , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ we must partake in the Great Game , let ’ s choose an ecosocialism that mends the metabolic rift between ecology and economy , and between the urban and the rural and wilderness , keeping the worst of these pathogens from emerging in the first place .
Let ’ s choose international solidarity with everyday people the world over .
Let ’ s realize a creaturely communism far from the Soviet model .
Let ’ s braid together a new world-system , indigenous liberation , farmer autonomy , strategic rewilding , and place-specific @ @ @ @ @ @ @ immune firebreaks of widely diverse varieties in livestock , poultry , and crops .
Let ’ s reintroduce natural selection as an ecosystem service and let our livestock and crops reproduce on-site , whereby they can pass along their outbreak-tested immunogenetics to the next generation .
Consider the options otherwise .
Maybe I ’ ve been unfair to the Reids of the world , who as a matter of professional obligation must believe their own contradictions .
But , as five hundred years of war and pestilence demonstrate , the sources of capital @ @ @ @ @ @ @ than willing to scale mountains made of body bags .
Evolutionary biologist Rob Wallace blogs at Farming Pathogens , and is the author of Big Farms Make Big Flu : Dispatches on Infectious Disease , Agribusiness , and the Nature of Science ( Monthly Review Press 2016 ) .
This article was first published by MR Online .
If this article was useful to you please consider sharing it with your networks .

By Rob Wallace, PhD
A new deadly coronavirus 2019-nCoV, related to SARS and MERS and apparently originating in live animal markets in Wuhan, China, is starting to spread worldwide.
Chinese authorities have reported 5974 cases nationwide, 1000 of them severe. With infections in nearly every province, authorities warned 2019-nCoV appears to be spreading fast out of its epicenter.
The characterization appears supported by initial modeling.
The virus’s basic reproduction number, a measure of the number of new cases per infection given no cap on available susceptibles, is clocking in at a healthy 3.11. That means in the face of such momentum, a control campaign must stop up to 75% of new infections to reverse the outbreak. The modeling team estimates there are presently over 21,000 cases, reported or not, in Wuhan alone.
Full-genome sequences of the virus meanwhile show few differences between the samples isolated across China. Slower spread for such a fast-evolving RNA virus would be marked by mutations accumulating place-to-place.
The coronavirus is starting to open up theaters overseas. Travelers with 2019-nCoV have been treated in Australia, France, Hong Kong, Japan, Malaysia, Nepal, Vietnam, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, and the United States. Local outbreaks are now starting up within sink countries.
As the infection is characterized by human-to-human transmission and an apparent two-week incubation period before the sickness hits, the infection will likely continue to spread across the globe. Whether it’ll be Wuhan everywhere remains an open question.
The virus’s final penetrance worldwide will depend on the difference between the rate of infection and the rate of removing infections by recovery or death. If the infection rate far exceeds removal, then the total population infected may approach the whole of humanity. That outcome, however, would likely be marked by large geographic variation brought about by a combination of dead chance and the differences in how countries responded to their outbreak.
Pandemic skeptics aren’t so sure of such a scenario. Far fewer patients have been infected and killed by 2019-nCoV than even the typical seasonal influenza. But the mistake here is in confusing a moment early in an outbreak for a virus’s essentialist nature.
Outbreaks are dynamic. Yes, some burn out, including, maybe, 2019-nCoV. It takes the right evolutionary draw and a little luck to beat out chance extirpation. Sometimes enough hosts don’t line up to keep transmission going. Other outbreaks explode. Those that make it on the world stage can be game changers, even if they eventually die out. They upend the everyday routines of even a world already in tumult or at war.
The deadliness of any potential pandemic strain is the meat of the matter, of course.
Should the virus prove less infectious or deadly than initially thought, civilization goes on, however many people are killed. The H1N1 (2009) influenza outbreak that worried so many a decade-plus ago proved less virulent than it first seemed. But even that strain penetrated the global population, and quietly killed patients, at magnitudes far beyond these first follow-up dismissals. H1N1 (2009) killed as many as 579,000 people its first year, producing complications in fifteen times more cases than initially projected from lab tests alone.
The danger here is found in humanity’s unprecedented connectivity. H1N1 (2009) crossed the Pacific Ocean in nine days, superseding predictions by the most sophisticated models of the global travel network by months. Airline data show a tenfold increase in travel in China just since the SARS epidemic.
Under such widespread percolation, low mortality for a large number of infections can still cause a large number of deaths. If four billion people are infected at a mortality rate of only 2%, a death rate less than half that of the 1918 influenza pandemic, eighty million people are killed. And unlike for seasonal influenza, we have neither herd immunity, nor a vaccine to slow it down. Even speeded-up development will at best take three months to produce a vaccine for 2019-nCoV, assuming it even works. Scientists successfully produced a vaccine for the H5N2 avian influenza only after the U.S. outbreak ended.
A critical epidemiological parameter will be the relationship between infectivity and when those infected express symptoms. SARS and MERS proved infectious only upon symptoms. If this bears out for 2019-nCoV, we may be in relatively good shape, all things considered. Even without a vaccine or tailored antivirals, we can immediately quarantine the suddenly sick, breaking chains of transmission with nineteenth-century public health.
Sunday, however, China’s health minister Ma Xiaowei stunned the world announcing that 2019-nCoV had expressed infectivity before symptoms. It’s such a turnabout that infuriated U.S. epidemiologists are demanding access to the data showing the new infectivity. The shock implies researchers stateside expect the virus couldn’t possibly be able to evolve outside what they appear to imagine as some public health archetype. If the new infection life history holds true, health authorities aren’t going to be able to use symptoms to identify newly active cases.
These unknowns—the exact source, infectivity, penetrance, and possible treatments—together explain why epidemiologists and public health officials are worried about 2019-nCoV. Unlike the seasonal influenzas cited by pandemic skeptics, the uncertainty rattles practitioners.
It is the nature of the job, to worry, yes. Worry is built into the very probabilities and systemic errors embodied more broadly in the trade. The damage in failing to prepare for an outbreak that proves deadly far exceeds that from the embarrassment of preparing for an outbreak that fails to live up to the hype. But in an era celebrating austerity, few jurisdictions wish to pay for a disaster that is no guarantee, whatever the collateral benefits of precaution or, on the other end of outcomes, the devastating losses associated with a bad gamble.
The choice how to respond is often entirely out of epidemiologist hands anyway. The national authorities who will make these decisions juggle multiple and often contrary agendas. Stopping even a deadly outbreak isn’t always treated as the most important objective.
While authorities stumble about figuring out what to do, the scale of impact can suddenly engage in escape velocity. As 2019-nCoV itself demonstrated moving from a single food market to the world stage in a month, the numbers can ramp up so far and fast that an epidemiologist’s best effort, their raison d’être, is dealt a lethal blow by facts on the ground.
…
My own visceral reactions this disease round have skipped across worry, disappointment, and impatience.
I’m an evolutionary biologist and public health phylogeographer who has worked on various aspects of these new pandemics for twenty-five years, much of my adult life. As I’ve written elsewhere, with the help of many others, I have tried parlaying a growing understanding of these pathogens, from the genetic sequences of my initial studies up through economic geographies of land use, the political economy of global agriculture, and the epistemology of science.
Clarity can sour a soul. As my social media chimed with queries about 2019-nCoV, my immediate response bordered on pique and exhaustion. What, pray, do you wish me to say? What do you want me to do about this?
In dispensing advice personal and professional to legitimately worried friends and colleagues, I made some wrong calls. To one farmer friend’s query about traveling abroad, I advised a surgeon’s mask, washing hands before all meals, and stop fucking livestock, bro. Darkly ribald humor gets me through stress, but his earnest reply, “Stop fucking livestock?” showed I had missed my mark. Not a good look on my part at all. I apologized. He laughed about it later.
It’s an occupational hazard. There is the danger of an existential dread that arises from the political inertia epidemiologists must square off with in preparing the world for a nigh-on irresistible pandemic their constituencies pretend is no bother until it’s too late.
If 2019-nCoV is indeed the Big Bug, and it is not clear yet if that’s the case, there is almost nothing to be done at this point. All we can do is batten down the public health hatches and hope the virus kills only a small part of the world’s population instead of 90%.
Clearly humanity shouldn’t start reacting to a pandemic when it’s already underway. It’s a total dereliction of any notion of forward-thinking theory or practice. And leaders and their learned supporters worldwide identify themselves as Prometheans!
As I wrote seven years ago:
I expect it will be a long time before I address an outbreak of human influenza again other than in passing. While an understandable visceral reaction, getting worried at this point in the process is a bit bass-ackwards. The bug, whatever its point of origin, has long left the barn, quite literally.
This century we’ve already trainspotted novel strains of African swine fever, Campylobacter, Cryptosporidium, Cyclospora, Ebola, E. coli O157:H7, foot-and-mouth disease, hepatitis E, Listeria, Nipah virus, Q fever, Salmonella, Vibrio, Yersinia, Zika, and a variety of novel inﬂuenza A variants, including H1N1 (2009), H1N2v, H3N2v, H5N1, H5N2, H5Nx, H6N1, H7N1, H7N3, H7N7, H7N9, and H9N2.
And near-nothing real was done about any of them. Authorities spent a sigh of relief upon each’s reversal and immediately took the next roll of the epidemiological dice, risking snake eyes of maximum virulence and transmissibility.
That approach suffers more than a failure of foresight or nerve. However necessary, emergency interventions cleaning up each of these messes can make matters worse.
You see, sources of intervention compete. And, as my colleagues and I argue, emergency criteria are deployed as impositions in Gramscian hegemony to keep us from talking about structural interventions around power and production. Because, don’t you know, we’re warned, IT’S AN EMERGENCY RIGHT NOW!
Atop this game of keep away, the failure to address structural problems can render these very emergency interventions ineffectual. The Allee threshold that prophylaxes and quarantine aim to push pathogen populations below—so that infections may burn out on their own unable to find new susceptibles—is set by structural causes.
As our team wrote about the Ebola outbreak in West Africa:
Commoditizing the forest may have lowered the region’s ecosystemic threshold to such a point that no emergency intervention can drive the Ebola outbreak low enough to burn out. Novel spillovers suddenly express larger forces of infection. On the other end of the epicurve, a mature outbreak continues to circulate, with the potential to intermittently rebound. In short, neoliberalism’s structural shifts are no mere background on which the emergency of Ebola takes place. The shifts are the emergency as much as the virus itself… Deforestation and intensive agriculture may strip out traditional agroforestry’s stochastic friction, which typically keeps the virus from lining up enough transmission.
Despite now with both an effective vaccine and antivirals, Ebola is presently undergoing its longest recorded outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo. What got lost along the way? Where is our biomedical God now? Blaming the Congolese to cover up this failure is an exercise in colonial displacement, washing imperialism’s hands of decades of structural adjustment and regime change in the global North’s favor.
Saying there’s nothing we can do isn’t quite right either, however, even as the complaint about reacting only upon a new disease’s attack still stands.
Within any one locale, there is a left program for an outbreak, including organizing neighborhood brigades in mutual aid, demanding any vaccine and antivirals developed be made available at no cost to everyone here and abroad, pirating antivirals and medical supplies, and securing unemployment and healthcare coverage as the economy tanks during the outbreak.
But that way of thinking and organizing, an integral part of the left’s legacy, appears to have left the building for more performative (and discursive) configurations online.
The reactionary bent to disease control left and right has since pivoted me to assisting efforts at anti-capitalist agricultures and conservation. Let’s stop the outbreaks we can’t handle from emerging in the first place. At this point in my career, with the structural pacing the emergencies, I generally write about infectious diseases in only tangential terms.
…
Structural causes of disease are themselves a source of debate. For one, questions remain as to 2019-nCoV’s origins.
Much initial attention has been placed on a particular exotic food market in Wuhan, with an orientalist preoccupation with strange and unsavory diets, representing both the end of biodiversity the West itself is destroying and a revolting source of dangerous disease:
The typical market in China has fruits and vegetables, butchered beef, pork and lamb, whole plucked chickens — with heads and beaks attached — and live crabs and fish, spewing water out of churning tanks. Some sell more unusual fare, including live snakes, turtles and cicadas, guinea pigs, bamboo rats, badgers, hedgehogs, otters, palm civets, even wolf cubs.
Said snakes are brandished as both signifier and signified, a literal source of 2019-nCoV that also harkens to a paradise lost and original sin from a serpent’s maw.
There is epidemiological evidence in the hypothesis’s favor. Thirty-three of 585 samples at the Wuhan market were found positive for 2019-nCoV, with 31 at the west end of the market where wildlife trading was concentrated.
On the other hand, only 41% of these positive samples were found in market streets where the wildlife were housed. A quarter of the original infectees never visited the Wuhan market or appeared directly exposed. The earliest case was identified before the market was hit. Other infected marketers trafficked in hog alone, a livestock species that expresses a common vulnerable molecular receptor, leading one team to hypothesize hog as the putative source for the new coronavirus.
Atop African swine fever, which has killed as many as half of China’s hog this past year, the latter possibility would represent quite the clusterfuck. Such disease convergences are not unheard of, even folding into an intimate reciprocal activation, wherein proteins of each pathogen catalyze each other, facilitating new clinical courses and transmission dynamics for both diseases.
At the same time, Western Sinophobia doesn’t absolve Chinese public health. Certainly the anger and disappointment the Chinese public has directed at local and federal authorities for their slow reaction to 2019-nCoV can’t be spun as weaponized xenophobia. And in our wise efforts to keep our foot out of that trap, we may also be missing a critical agroecological symmetry.
Setting aside the culture war, wet markets and exotic food are staples in China, as is now industrial production, juxtaposed alongside each other since economic liberalization post-Mao. Indeed, the two food modes may be integrated by way of land use.
Expanding industrial production may push increasingly capitalized wild foods deeper into the last of the primary landscape, dredging out a wider variety of potentially protopandemic pathogens. Peri-urban loops of growing extent and population density may increase the interface (and spillover) between wild nonhuman populations and newly urbanized rurality.
Worldwide, even the wildest subsistence species are being roped into ag value chains: among them ostriches, porcupine, crocodiles, fruit bats, and the palm civet, whose partially digested berries now supply the world’s most expensive coffee bean. Some wild species are making it onto forks before they are even scientifically identified, including one new short-nosed dogfish found in a Taiwanese market.
All are increasingly treated as food commodities. As nature is stripped place-by-place, species-by-species, what’s left over becomes that much more valuable.
Weberian anthropologist Lyle Fearnley pointed out that farmers in China repeatedly manipulate the distinction between wildness and domesticity as an economic signifier, producing new meanings and values attached to their animals, including in response to the very epidemiological alerts issued around their trade. A Marxist might push back that these signifiers emerge out of a context that extends well beyond smallholder control and out onto global circuits of capital.
So while the distinction between factory farms and wet markets isn’t unimportant, we may miss their similarities (and dialectical relationships).
The distinctions bleed together by a number of other mechanisms. Many a smallholder worldwide, including in China, is in actuality a contractor, growing out day-old poultry, for instance, for industrial processing. So on a contractor’s smallholding along the forest edge, a food animal may catch a pathogen before being shipped back to a processing plant on the outer ring of a major city.
Spreading factory farms meanwhile may force increasingly corporatized wild foods companies to trawl deeper into the forest, increasing the likelihood of picking up a new pathogen, while reducing the kind of environmental complexity with which the forest disrupts transmission chains.
Capital weaponizes the resulting disease investigations. Blaming smallholders is now a standard agribusiness crisis management practice, but clearly diseases are a matter of systems of production over time and space and mode, not just specific actors between whom we can juggle blame.
As a class, the coronaviruses appear to straddle these distinctions. While SARS and 2019-nCoV appeared to have emerged out of wet markets—possible pigs aside—MERS, the other deadly coronavirus, emerged straight out of an industrializing camel sector in the Middle East. It’s a path to virulence largely left out of broader scientific discussion about these viruses.
It should change how we think about them. I would recommend we err on the side of viewing disease causality and intervention beyond the biomedical or even ecohealth object and out into the field of ecosocial relationships.
Other ethoses see a different way out. Some researchers recommend we genetically engineer poultry and livestock to be resistant to these diseases. They leave out whether that would still allow these strains to circulate among what would now be asymptomatic food animals before spilling over into decidedly unengineered humans.
Again turning back the clock, a source of my pique, nine years ago I wrote about what efforts at genetically engineering out pathogens miss as matters of first principle:
Beyond the issue of the affordability of the new frankenchicken, especially for the poorest countries, influenza’s success arises in part from its capacity to outwit and outlast such silver bullets. Hypotheses tied to a lucrative model of biology are routinely mistaken for expectations about material reality, expectations are mistaken for projections, and projections for predictions.
One source of vexation is the dimensionality of the problem. There is even among mainstream scholars a dawning realization influenza is more than mere virion or infection; that it respects little of disciplinary boundaries (and business plans) in both their form and content. Pathogens regularly use processes accumulating at one level of biocultural organization to solve problems they face at other levels, including the molecular.
Agribusiness ever turns us toward a techno-utopian future to keep us in a past bounded by capitalist relations. We are spun round and round the very commodity tracks selecting for new diseases in the first place.
…
The secret thrill (and open terror) epidemiologists feel in an outbreak is nothing more than defeat disguised as heroism.
Almost the entirety of the profession is presently organized around post-hoc duties, much like a stable boy with a shovel following behind the elephants at a circus. Under the neoliberal program, epidemiologists and public health units are funded to clean up the system’s mess, while rationalizing even the worst practices that lead to many a deadly pandemic’s emergence.
In a commentary on the new coronavirus, one Simon Reid, a professor of communicable disease control at the University of Queensland, instantiates the resulting incoherence.
Reid pings from topic to topic, failing to weave a whole out of his technicist observations. Such folly isn’t necessarily a matter of incompetence or malicious intent upon Reid’s part. It is more a matter of the contradictory obligations of the neoliberal university.
U.S. leftists recently joined swords over the existence of the professional-managerial class. Jacobin social democrats rail at the capitalist PMC they angle to join in a Sanders administration, while tankies claim managers are proletarian too. I’ll sidestep the metaphysical debate—how many PMC can dance on an epipen?—only to observe that whether the PMC theoretically exists in epidemiology, I’ve met its members in the flesh. They live!
Reid and other institutional epidemiologists are on the hook for cleaning up diseases of neoliberal origins—yes, including out of China—while meting out comforting platitudes that the system that pays them works. It’s a double bind many practitioners choose to live with, nay, prosper from, even should the resulting epidemiologies threaten millions.
Reid here kinda gets the food system and conservation parts of the explanation for 2019-nCoV (and many of its celebrity forerunners out of the series of epidemiological reality shows run this century so far). But in introducing this protopandemic, he propositions, to paraphrase, that “This utter horror has a saving grace—hooray!” And it is that “China has been a source of repeated outbreaks, but it, and a WHO now owned by philanthrocapitalism, conducts exemplary biocontrol.”
We can reject Sinophobia, offer material support, and still well remember China covered up the SARS outbreak in 2003. Beijing suppressed media and public health reports, allowing that coronavirus to splatter across its own country. Medical authorities one province over from an outbreak didn’t know what their patients were suddenly showing up with at the ER. SARS eventually spread across multiple countries as far as Canada and was barely driven to extirpation.
The new century has meanwhile been marked by China’s failure or refusal to unpack its near-perfect storm of rice, duck, and industrial poultry and hog production driving multiple novel strains of influenza. It is treated as a price for prosperity.
This is no Chinese exceptionalism, however. The U.S. and Europe have served as ground zeros for new influenzas as well, recently H5N2 and H5Nx, and their multinationals and neocolonial proxies drove the emergence of Ebola in West Africa and Zika in Brazil. U.S. public health officials covered for agribusiness during the H1N1 (2009) and H5N2 outbreaks.
Perhaps then we should refrain from choosing between one of two cycles of capital accumulation: the end of the American cycle or the start of the Chinese one (or, as Reid appears to do, both). At the risk of accusations of third campism, choosing neither is another option.
If we must partake in the Great Game, let’s choose an ecosocialism that mends the metabolic rift between ecology and economy, and between the urban and the rural and wilderness, keeping the worst of these pathogens from emerging in the first place. Let’s choose international solidarity with everyday people the world over.
Let’s realize a creaturely communism far from the Soviet model. Let’s braid together a new world-system, indigenous liberation, farmer autonomy, strategic rewilding, and place-specific agroecologies that, redefining biosecurity, reintroduce immune firebreaks of widely diverse varieties in livestock, poultry, and crops.
Let’s reintroduce natural selection as an ecosystem service and let our livestock and crops reproduce on-site, whereby they can pass along their outbreak-tested immunogenetics to the next generation.
Consider the options otherwise.
Maybe I’ve been unfair to the Reids of the world, who as a matter of professional obligation must believe their own contradictions. But, as five hundred years of war and pestilence demonstrate, the sources of capital that many epidemiologists now serve are more than willing to scale mountains made of body bags.
Evolutionary biologist Rob Wallace blogs at Farming Pathogens, and is the author of Big Farms Make Big Flu: Dispatches on Infectious Disease, Agribusiness, and the Nature of Science (Monthly Review Press 2016). This article was first published by MR Online.
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independentsciencenews--2020-02-13--Extensive Chemical Safety Fraud Uncovered at German Testing Laboratory

by Jonathan Latham , PhD ( Please note : this article contains disturbing content ) The case of an animal rights activist who infiltrated an independent German chemical testing laboratory has triggered the discovery of an apparently extensive chemical testing fraud .
LPT Hamburg , with around 175 employees , is one of the largest contract laboratories in Germany .
It is a family owned private company .
It prepares regulatory studies on behalf of the pharmaceutical and pesticide industries and has three locations : Mienenbüttel in Lower Saxony , Neugraben in Hamburg and Wankendorf in Schleswig-Holstein .
An initial @ @ @ @ @ @ @ by the German magazine FAKT , which worked with the animal rights organisations Cruelty Free International and SOKO-Tierschutz to expose the findings of the undercover employee .
The disturbing irregularities they discovered included the death and replacement of animals without this being reported to authorities .
This distressing video from FAKT summarises the findings and was filmed at LPT .
But since the initial investigation by FAKT five former employees of LPT Hamburg have come forward with new information .
In interviews broadcast by FAKT in November of 2019 , one employee told @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I not only experienced it , I did it myself .
I forged documents ; our studies .
If the results did not meet expectations , I was asked to improve them .
The data that did not fit in were marked so that I could enter it on the blank protocol the new values that were given to me .
The new report was also marked with the old date and my signature… ” A second employee who came forward told FAKT : “ These animals , especially in the high-dose group @ @ @ @ @ @ @ so it was the raw meat that was visible , miserable really miserable .
[ … ] In fact , one animal died in the high-dose group and was replaced by another animal .
Here , too , the tattoo number , which is in the chest area of the animal , was cut out of the dead animal and added to the organs of the replaced animal after the end of the study .
So that it looks as if this animal had not died at all.
“ A third told FAKT @ @ @ @ @ @ @ studies and that they later reported this to the German authorities : “ So , a few months after I left LPT , I contacted the responsible authorities here .
And had an appointment .
And in this appointment we discussed the LPT issue together .
It was also about manipulation of data and of course about the fact that studies were so strongly influenced that it was not compatible with my conscience.
” However , the employee never heard from the authority again .
These revelations have major implications for public and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that testing by commercial laboratories is independent of the chemical industry , thereby challenging the validity of the entire system of toxicological evaluation of chemicals like pesticides and pharmaceuticals .
These allegations echo previous cases of chemical testing fraud , such as the IBT scandal of the late 1970s , including the more recent realisation that this fraud was covered up by the overseeing government agencies , such as the US EPA .
A further implication , according to a new report on the LPT case carried out by PAN Germany , Corporate @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , is that many of the studies supporting the EU ’ s reapproval of glyphosate came from LPT .
According to the EU ’ s reassessment of glyphosate , all industry-derived studies on genotoxicity concluded that glyphosate was safe , or nearly so .
On the other hand , the majority of peer-reviewed studies concluded it was not .
In its reauthorization process the EU agency which evaluated glyphosate concluded that the industry studies submitted were reliable and the peer-reviewed studies were “ not reliable ” .
This designation cleared the way for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ by Monsanto supporting glyphosate ’ s reauthorization came from LPT .
The primary given reason why peer reviewed studies are deemed inadmissible by regulators is that they do not have the technical certification known as Good Laboratory Practice ( GLP ) .
GLP follows OECD guidelines which were adopted by the EU in 2004 .
GLP has long been criticised as failing to guarantee high quality research ( Elliott et al .
2016 , Myers et al .
2009 , Wagner and Michaels 2004 ) .
It has always been defended , however @ @ @ @ @ @ @ exactly this kind of fraud .
Elliott , Kevin C. Standardized study designs , value judgments , and financial conflicts of interest in research .
Perspectives on Science 24.5 ( 2016 ) : 529-551 .
Myers , John Peterson , et al .
Why public health agencies can not depend on good laboratory practices as a criterion for selecting data : the case of bisphenol A .
Environmental health perspectives 117.3 ( 2009 ) : 309-315 .
Wagner , Wendy , and David Michaels .
Equal treatment for regulatory science : extending the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to private research .
American journal of law & medicine 30.2-3 ( 2004 ) : 119-154 .
If this article was useful to you please consider sharing it with your networks .

by Jonathan Latham, PhD (Please note: this article contains disturbing content)
The case of an animal rights activist who infiltrated an independent German chemical testing laboratory has triggered the discovery of an apparently extensive chemical testing fraud.
LPT Hamburg, with around 175 employees, is one of the largest contract laboratories in Germany. It is a family owned private company. It prepares regulatory studies on behalf of the pharmaceutical and pesticide industries and has three locations: Mienenbüttel in Lower Saxony, Neugraben in Hamburg and Wankendorf in Schleswig-Holstein.
An initial case of fraud was reported in 2019 by the German magazine FAKT, which worked with the animal rights organisations Cruelty Free International and SOKO-Tierschutz to expose the findings of the undercover employee. The disturbing irregularities they discovered included the death and replacement of animals without this being reported to authorities.
This distressing video from FAKT summarises the findings and was filmed at LPT.
But since the initial investigation by FAKT five former employees of LPT Hamburg have come forward with new information.
In interviews broadcast by FAKT in November of 2019, one employee told the magazine of testing fraud:
“I not only experienced it, I did it myself. I forged documents; our studies. If the results did not meet expectations, I was asked to improve them. The data that did not fit in were marked so that I could enter it on the blank protocol the new values that were given to me. The new report was also marked with the old date and my signature…”
A second employee who came forward told FAKT:
“These animals, especially in the high-dose group, actually had completely open skin – so it was the raw meat that was visible, miserable really miserable. […] In fact, one animal died in the high-dose group and was replaced by another animal. Here, too, the tattoo number, which is in the chest area of the animal, was cut out of the dead animal and added to the organs of the replaced animal after the end of the study. So that it looks as if this animal had not died at all.“
A third told FAKT that they had observed repeated falsification of studies and that they later reported this to the German authorities:
“So, a few months after I left LPT, I contacted the responsible authorities here. And had an appointment. And in this appointment we discussed the LPT issue together. It was also about manipulation of data and of course about the fact that studies were so strongly influenced that it was not compatible with my conscience.”
However, the employee never heard from the authority again.
These revelations have major implications for public and environmental health. They undermine the idea that testing by commercial laboratories is independent of the chemical industry, thereby challenging the validity of the entire system of toxicological evaluation of chemicals like pesticides and pharmaceuticals. These allegations echo previous cases of chemical testing fraud, such as the IBT scandal of the late 1970s, including the more recent realisation that this fraud was covered up by the overseeing government agencies, such as the US EPA.
A further implication, according to a new report on the LPT case carried out by PAN Germany, Corporate Europe Observatory and Global 2000 of Austria, is that many of the studies supporting the EU’s reapproval of glyphosate came from LPT.
According to the EU’s reassessment of glyphosate, all industry-derived studies on genotoxicity concluded that glyphosate was safe, or nearly so. On the other hand, the majority of peer-reviewed studies concluded it was not. In its reauthorization process the EU agency which evaluated glyphosate concluded that the industry studies submitted were reliable and the peer-reviewed studies were “not reliable”. This designation cleared the way for reauthorization. At least 21 studies submitted by Monsanto supporting glyphosate’s reauthorization came from LPT.
The primary given reason why peer reviewed studies are deemed inadmissible by regulators is that they do not have the technical certification known as Good Laboratory Practice (GLP). GLP follows OECD guidelines which were adopted by the EU in 2004.
GLP has long been criticised as failing to guarantee high quality research (Elliott et al. 2016, Myers et al. 2009, Wagner and Michaels 2004). It has always been defended, however, on the basis that it prevented exactly this kind of fraud.
References
Elliott, Kevin C. Standardized study designs, value judgments, and financial conflicts of interest in research. Perspectives on Science 24.5 (2016): 529-551.
Myers, John Peterson, et al. Why public health agencies cannot depend on good laboratory practices as a criterion for selecting data: the case of bisphenol A. Environmental health perspectives 117.3 (2009): 309-315.
Wagner, Wendy, and David Michaels. Equal treatment for regulatory science: extending the controls governing the quality of public research to private research. American journal of law & medicine 30.2-3 (2004): 119-154.
If this article was useful to you please consider sharing it with your networks.


independentsciencenews--2020-01-19--Another Disease Outbreak Threatens U.S. Pigs, But Big Ag Would Rather Talk About Bacon Prices

There ’ s a lot the industrial factory farm industry prefers to keep consumers in the dark about , including what happens when millions of confined , stressed out animals with weakened immune systems are exposed to disease .
What ’ s the latest food animal pandemic Big Meat has been trying to keep out of the news ?
African swine fever ( ASF ) , caused by the African swine fever virus ( ASFV ) , a disease that in 2019 killed one-fourth of the world ’ s pigs , including half of all China ’ s factory farm @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s coverage of ASF has focused almost exclusively on economic issues , including the disease ’ s potential impact on global trade .
Questions about the pandemic disease potentials of intensive animal agriculture are skirted .
ASF originated in East Africa and reached Eastern Europe in 2007 , where it has remained .
Since ASF ’ s outbreak in China in 2018 , in which half of the country ’ s pigs died and another 1 million were culled , ASF has spread to Vietnam , Cambodia , Laos , North Korea @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Europe and even Belgium .
“ It ’ s not a question of whether ASF reaches American shores , but when , ” write Thomas Parsons , professor at the School of Veterinary Medicine , and Scott Michael Moore , China Program Director at the University of Pennsylvania , in the Hill .
“ Should the virus enter the U.S. , your future as a pork producer would radically change , ” warns Pork Business .
In acute cases , the ASF virus causes death in one to eight days .
This allows @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and their meat are sold , either deliberately or not .
This is not the first time that Big Meat has kept the facts about major animal pandemics away from consumers , who likely would be turned off to industrially produced meat if they knew the truth .
The factory farm meat industry also suppressed the facts about porcine epidemic diarrhea virus ( PEDv ) and avian flu .
By 2014 , PEDv had killed 10 percent of pigs confined in factory farms in the U.S .
The PEDv scourge was so devastating @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to other pigs in an attempt to induce “ immunity ” in survivors .
To combat PEDv the government gave $ 11.1 million of our tax dollars to private farmers who were “ producers of infected herds.
” Here ’ s a cheaper idea : How about giving the animals fresh air , space to move and no drugs ?
From 2014 through mid-2015 , 48 million chickens and turkeys were killed in the U.S. to prevent the spread of bird flu , and to protect farmer profits .
Yet despite the mass @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 2017 .
It ’ s easy to see why .
To prevent the spread of bird flu , in many cases , healthy , floor-reared turkeys and broiler chickens were herded into enclosed areas where they were administered propylene glycol foam to suffocate them .
In other cases , birds were killed by “ ventilation shutdown ” ––the term used when barn temperatures are raised to at least 104°F for a minimum of three hours to kill the entire flock .
As reported by Fortune , “ round-the-clock incinerators and crews in hazmat @ @ @ @ @ @ @ depopulation in 2015 .
When farm animal disease pandemics hit in the U.S. , Big Meat likes to control the mainstream media ’ s narrative by focusing the story on “ the price of bacon , ” trade wars or farmer profits .
With the ASF virus , mainstream media is naively portraying it as a disease of other countries .
For example , The New York Times attributes China ’ s ASF to the country ’ s “ emphasis on government-driven , top-down solutions to major problems , sometimes at the expense @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ignores the U.S. ’ s recent PEDv and bird flu epidemics .
The Times also indicts China ’ s “ small farms , often packed together in crowded agricultural areas , ” for the pandemic—again conveniently ignoring the U.S. ’ s own crowded factory farms , which are certainly at risk .
The real story of ASF is this : Factory farm animal prisons , with their pesticides , antibiotics and intense confinement , weaken the immune systems of animals , making them highly susceptible to pandemics .
The model also causes egregious @ @ @ @ @ @ @ human consumers .
The African swine fever is just the latest example .
This post first appeared at The Organic Consumers Association here .
If this article was useful to you please consider sharing it with your networks .

By Martha Rosenberg
There’s a lot the industrial factory farm industry prefers to keep consumers in the dark about, including what happens when millions of confined, stressed out animals with weakened immune systems are exposed to disease.
What’s the latest food animal pandemic Big Meat has been trying to keep out of the news? African swine fever (ASF), caused by the African swine fever virus (ASFV), a disease that in 2019 killed one-fourth of the world’s pigs, including half of all China’s factory farm pigs.
So far, mainstream media’s coverage of ASF has focused almost exclusively on economic issues, including the disease’s potential impact on global trade. Questions about the pandemic disease potentials of intensive animal agriculture are skirted.
ASF originated in East Africa and reached Eastern Europe in 2007, where it has remained. Since ASF’s outbreak in China in 2018, in which half of the country’s pigs died and another 1 million were culled, ASF has spread to Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, North Korea, the Philippines, more of eastern Europe and even Belgium.
“It’s not a question of whether ASF reaches American shores, but when,” write Thomas Parsons, professor at the School of Veterinary Medicine, and Scott Michael Moore, China Program Director at the University of Pennsylvania, in the Hill.
“Should the virus enter the U.S., your future as a pork producer would radically change,” warns Pork Business.
In acute cases, the ASF virus causes death in one to eight days. This allows the spread of the disease as animals and their meat are sold, either deliberately or not.
This is not the first time that Big Meat has kept the facts about major animal pandemics away from consumers, who likely would be turned off to industrially produced meat if they knew the truth. The factory farm meat industry also suppressed the facts about porcine epidemic diarrhea virus (PEDv) and avian flu.
By 2014, PEDv had killed 10 percent of pigs confined in factory farms in the U.S.
The PEDv scourge was so devastating, a Kentucky farm fed dead pigs to other pigs in an attempt to induce “immunity” in survivors.
To combat PEDv the government gave $11.1 million of our tax dollars to private farmers who were “producers of infected herds.”
Here’s a cheaper idea: How about giving the animals fresh air, space to move and no drugs?
From 2014 through mid-2015, 48 million chickens and turkeys were killed in the U.S. to prevent the spread of bird flu, and to protect farmer profits. Yet despite the mass murder spree, the disease resurfaced in 2017.
It’s easy to see why. To prevent the spread of bird flu, in many cases, healthy, floor-reared turkeys and broiler chickens were herded into enclosed areas where they were administered propylene glycol foam to suffocate them.
In other cases, birds were killed by “ventilation shutdown”––the term used when barn temperatures are raised to at least 104°F for a minimum of three hours to kill the entire flock. As reported by Fortune, “round-the-clock incinerators and crews in hazmat suits” were commonly required for bird depopulation in 2015.
When farm animal disease pandemics hit in the U.S., Big Meat likes to control the mainstream media’s narrative by focusing the story on “the price of bacon,” trade wars or farmer profits. With the ASF virus, mainstream media is naively portraying it as a disease of other countries.
For example, The New York Times attributes China’s ASF to the country’s “emphasis on government-driven, top-down solutions to major problems, sometimes at the expense of the practical.” This analysis conveniently ignores the U.S.’s recent PEDv and bird flu epidemics.
The Times also indicts China’s “small farms, often packed together in crowded agricultural areas,” for the pandemic—again conveniently ignoring the U.S.’s own crowded factory farms, which are certainly at risk.
The real story of ASF is this: Factory farm animal prisons, with their pesticides, antibiotics and intense confinement, weaken the immune systems of animals, making them highly susceptible to pandemics. The model also causes egregious harm to workers, the environment and human consumers.
The African swine fever is just the latest example.
This post first appeared at The Organic Consumers Association here.
If this article was useful to you please consider sharing it with your networks.