Synopsis: As Wallace describes, “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.”
Yet each time governments did nothing “real” to prevent the arrival of the next potential pandemic. Nothing, that is, to identify the roots of how and why these pathogens arise and spread, and uproot them. Instead, as this would mean tackling industrial agriculture and large corporations, “authorities spent a sigh of relief upon each ones reversal, and immediately took the next roll of the epidemiological dice, risking snake eyes of maximum virulence and transmissibility.”
Read the full article on Independent Science News: We Need to Connect the 2019-nCoV Coronavirus to Agriculture
Rob Wallace, PhD is the author of: Big Farms Make Big Flu “In Big Farms Make Big Flu, a collection of dispatches by turns harrowing and thought-provoking, Wallace tracks the ways influenza and other pathogens emerge from an agriculture controlled by multinational corporations…..Big Farms Make Big Flu integrates the political economies of disease and science to derive a new understanding of the evolution of infections. ” He also offers solutions.
