EATING ANIMALS
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER
BACK BAY BOOKS 2009
PART VI
Chapter 4: Influence/Speechlessness
On average, Americans eat the equivalent of 21,000 entire animals in a lifetime.
Lam Hoi-ka
Johan Hultin, a six-foot-tall Swede arrived in Brevig on August 19, 1997, and got right to digging. Beneath the feet of solid ice were bodies. He was excavating a mass grace. Deep in the permafrost were preserved the victims of the 1918 flu pandemic. The one person Hultin shared his plans with was a fellow scientist, Jeffery Taubenberger, who was also looking for the source of the 1918 flu. Hultin’s search for the dead of 1918 was timely. It was only a few months before his arrival in Brevig Mission that an H5N1-type virus in Hong Kong’s chickens apparently “jumped” to humans for the first time – an event of potentially historic significance.
- Three-year-old Lam Hoi-La was the first of six to be killed by this particularly ominous version of the H5N1 virus. Had health authorities not acted as they did (or had our luck been worse), Lam Hoi-ka might have been death number one in a global pandemic.
- The worrisome strains of H5N1 have not disappeared from the planet even if it has disappeared from American headlines.
- The question is whether it will continue to kill a relatively small number of people or mutate into a deadlier version.
- Viruses like H5N1 can be ferocious entrepreneurs, constantly innovating, relentless in their aim of corrupting the human immune system.
With a potential H5N1 nightmare looming, Hultin and Taubenberger wanted to know what had caused the 1918 pandemic. And for good reason: the 1918 pandemic killed more people faster than any other disease – or any other anything– had before or has since.
Influenza
The 1918 pandemic has been remembered as the “Spanish flu” because the Spanish press was the only Western media to adequately cover its massive toll. Despite its name, Spanish flu struck the entire world – that’s what made it a pandemic instead of simply an epidemic. It was not the first influenza pandemic, nor the most recent (1957 and 1968 also saw pandemics), but it was by far the most deadly. Whereas AIDS took roughly 24 years to kill 24 million people, the Spanish flu killed as many in 24 weeks. Some recent revisions of the death toll suggest that 50 million or even as many as 100 million people were killed world-wide. Estimates suggest that one-quarter of Americans, and perhaps one-quarter of the world, fell ill.
- Unlike most influenzas that mortally threaten only the very young, very old, and already ill, the Spanish flu killed healthy people in the prime of their lives.
- Mortality was actually highest in the 25 to 29-year-old age group, and at the flu’s peak the average life expectancy for Americans was reduced to 37 years.
- 20,000 Americans died in a week during the height of the Spanish flu. Steam shovels were used to dig mass graves.
Health authorities today fear precisely such an event. Many insist that a pandemic based on H5N1 virus strain is inevitable, and the question is really one of when it will strike and, most important, just how severe it will be. The director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO) has said simply, “We know another pandemic is inevitable. It is coming.” The National Academy of Sciences Institute of Medicine has added more recently that a pandemic is “not only inevitable, but overdue.”
- Recent history has averaged a pandemic every 27½ years, and it’s now been over 40 years since the last one.
- Scientists cannot know with certainty the future of pandemic diseases, but they can and do know that a threat is imminent.
WHO officials now have at their fingertips the most massive assemblage of scientific data ever gathered about a potential new flu pandemic. So it is quite unnerving that this very suit-and-tie and long-white-jackets, very now-don’t everyone panic type of institution has the following list of “things you need to know about influenza” for its constituency, which is everyone:
The world may be on the brink of another pandemic.
All countries will be affected.
Widespread illness will occur.
Medical supplies will be inadequate.
Large numbers of deaths will occur.
Economic and social disruption will be great.
- The WHO suggests “a relative conservative estimate – from 2 million to 7.4 million deaths”, based on the comparatively mild 1957 pandemic. Estimates based on the one seen in 1918 are much higher.
Hultin eventually uncovered the remains of a woman among the frozen dead of 1918 and named her Lucy. He cut out Lucy’s lungs and mailed them to Taubenberger, who took samples from the tissue and found evidence of something quite remarkable. The results, published in 2005, show that the source of the 1918 pandemic was avian influenza – bird flu. A major scientific question had been answered.
Other evidence suggests that the 1918 virus might have mutated within pigs (which are uniquely susceptible to both human and bird viruses) or even in human populations for a time before reaching the deadly virtuosity of its final version. We cannot be sure. What we can be sure of is that there is scientific consensus that new viruses, which move between farmed animals and humans, will be a major global health threat into the foreseeable future. The concern is not only bird flu or swine flu or whatever-comes-next, but the entire class of “zoonotic” (animal-to-human or vice versa) pathogens – especially viruses that move between humans, chickens, turkeys, and pigs.
We can also be sure that any talk of pandemic influenza today cannot ignore the fact that the most devastating disease event the world has ever known, and one of the greatest health threats before us today, has everything to do with the health of the world’s farmed animals, birds most of all.
All flus
Another key figure in the story of influenza research is a virologist named Robert Webster, who proved the avian origins of all human influenza. He called it the “barnyard theory,” which surmises that “the viruses in human pandemics recruit some of their genes from flu viruses in domestic birds.”
- Today the best evidence suggests that the avian source of the 1968 pandemic is not unique: scientists now argue that the primordial source of all flu strains is migrating aquatic birds such as ducks and geese that have roamed the earth for more than a hundred million years. The flu, it turns out, is all about our relationship with birds.
- Neither wild nor domestic birds necessarily become sick from these viruses. They often simply carry them, sometimes clear across the globe, and then shed them through faeces into lakes, rivers, ponds, and, quite often, thanks to industrial animal-processing techniques, directly into the food we eat.
- Each mammalian species is vulnerable to only some of the viruses carried by birds.
- The trouble begins when a virus in one species begins to get itchy and starts showing a fondness for mixing with viruses in others, as H1N1 has done (combining bird, pig, and human viruses).
In the case of H5N1, there are fears that the actual “creation” of a new virus highly contagious to humans might occur in pig populations, since pigs are susceptible to the types of viruses that attack birds as well as to those that attack humans. When a single pig gets infected with two different virus types at the same time, there is a possibility of viruses trading genes. The H1N1 swine flu appears to have resulted from just this. What’s worrisome is that such gene swapping could lead to the creation of a virus that has the virulence of bird flu and the every-one-is-getting-it contagiousness of the common cold.
How did this new landscape of disease come about? To what extent is modern animal agriculture responsible? To answer these questions, we need to know where the birds we eat come from, and why their environments are perfect to make not only the birds, but us, sick.