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Strategies & Market Trends : YEEHAW CANDIDATES -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Augustus Gloop who wrote (13951)	12/19/2005 4:57:02 AM
From: Galirayo	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 23958

A monster called the H5N1 virus Sunday, December 18, 2005 JOSEPH BEDNARIK A lbert Camus' existential novel "The Plague" and "The Diary of Anne Frank" are two books referenced in the opening paragraph of "The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu," Mike Davis' slender and fast-paced book about a likely avian flu pandemic. Camus and Frank are potent reference points: Camus, who suffered from tuberculosis, explored the effects of plague on a city, while Frank hid for her life from the plague of deadly politics. Disease and politics, on a global scale, are at the heart of this new book. "The Monster at Our Door" is a title more apt for a B-grade science fiction movie, but after reading the book you might wish it were a bad movie -- one that could be forgotten or, better yet, mocked at a cocktail party. But it isn't. It's about the real world of governments and multinational corporations, of industrialized livestock production and urban slums, of "Big Pharma" and an influenza virus endemic in poultry and water fowl that threatens to be unleashed on the global human population. Some microbiologists contend a pandemic is late in arriving and that we're living on borrowed time. As Camus writes: "a hundred million corpses broadcast throughout history are no more than a puff of smoke in the imagination." Too many zeroes becomes an abstraction, like the nothingness of the ozone hole or global warming, issues so vast they neatly fit inside our "too-big-to-think-about" file. So Davis launches his book with specific deaths in Thailand, where a girl contracted avian flu (the H5N1 virus) from chickens, then her otherwise healthy 26-year-old mother contracted the avian flu after cradling and soothing her daughter during the last night of the child's life. The mother's death is significant because it is the first recorded human-to-human transmission of H5N1. From these two finite deaths Davis pulls back to survey the landscape of governments and corporate interests, doctors and scientists racing to trace and track the virus, the flimsy global network of communication and cooperation and "the absence of an international public health system corresponding to the scale and impact of economic globalization." Thriving within all this human activity and intrigue is a virus that has no agenda other than its own evolution and survival, that doesn't own stock or campaign for election. When a former virologist at Oregon State University heard the title of this book she asked, "Are you referring to George Bush or the avian flu?" Davis, a contributing editor to The Nation and recipient of a MacArthur genius award, no doubt intends both. He takes pains to criticize the Bush administration, and several other governments, for their woeful preparations for avian flu. At the time of the book's publication this fall, the United States had procured only enough antiviral medication to cover 1 percent of the population, with the first doses allocated to "forward deployed" military forces and key government officials. The World Health Organization has been warning against an H5N1 pandemic for several years. According to its Web site (www.who.int/en): "a pandemic can start when three conditions have been met: a new influenza virus subtype emerges; it infects humans, causing serious illness; and it spreads easily and sustainably among humans." At this point, according to WHO, "the H5N1 virus amply meets the first two conditions." When the third condition is met, the worldwide death toll from pandemic flu is estimated to be between 30 million and 1 billion people. That's nine zeroes -- 1,000,000,000 -- and 10 times as many deaths as Camus' "puff of smoke." Much of this death will occur in urban megaslums, a situation that Davis vividly describes as "so many lakes of gasoline waiting for the spark of H5N1." It's profoundly eerie when Davis, who in 208 pages provides 344 footnotes, concludes his book with a misty reference to sci-fi thrillers and the hope that the world "unites to defeat the invader." The MacArthur recipient admits his respect by calling H5N1 a capital-M Monster, and brings his book to a close with the ominous question: "Now, with a real Monster at our door -- as terrible as any in science fiction -- will we wake up in time?" This book is part of the alarm. Joseph Bednarik works at Copper Canyon Press in Port Townsend, Wash. oregonlive.com