Some thoughts from the ground on the pig flu

The following article was one of the more intelligent analysis of the swine flu situation I have found so far. It was written by Mike Davis and printed on The Guardian and can be found at the following link:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/apr/27/swine-flu-mexico-health

QUOTE:

The swine flu crisis lays bare the meat industry's monstrous power

The Mexican swine flu, a genetic chimera probably conceived in the faecal mire of an industrial pigsty, suddenly threatens to give the whole world a fever. The initial outbreaks across North America reveal an infection already travelling at higher velocity than did the last official pandemic strain, the 1968 Hong Kong flu.

Stealing the limelight from our officially appointed assassin, H5N1, this porcine virus is a threat of unknown magnitude. It seems less lethal than Sars in 2003, but as an influenza it may be more durable than Sars. Given that domesticated seasonal type-A influenzas kill as many one million people a year, even a modest increment of virulence, especially if combined with high incidence, could produce carnage equivalent to a major war.

Meanwhile, one of its first victims has been the consoling faith, long preached by the World Health Organisation, that pandemics can be contained by the rapid responses of medical bureaucracies, independent of the quality of local public health. Since the initial H5N1 deaths in Hong Kong in 1997, the WHO, with the support of most national health services, has promoted a strategy focused on the identification and isolation of a pandemic strain within its local radius of outbreak, followed by a thorough dousing of the population with antivirals and (if available) vaccine.

An army of sceptics has contested this viral counter-insurgency approach, pointing out that microbes can now fly around the world (quite literally in the case of avian flu) faster than WHO or local officials can react to the original outbreak. They also pointed to the primitive, often non-existent surveillance of the interface between human and animal diseases. But the mythology of bold, preemptive (and cheap) intervention against avian flu has been invaluable to the cause of rich countries, like the US and UK, who prefer to invest in their own biological Maginot lines rather than dramatically increasing aid to epidemic frontlines overseas, as well as to big pharma, which has battled developing-world demands for the generic, public manufacture of critical antivirals like Roche's Tamiflu.

The swine flu may prove that the WHO/Centres for Disease Control version of pandemic preparedness – without massive new investment in surveillance, scientific and regulatory infrastructure, basic public health, and global access to lifeline drugs – belongs to the same class of Ponzified risk management as Madoff securities. It is not so much that the pandemic warning system has failed as it simply doesn't exist, even in North America and the EU.

Perhaps it is not surprising that Mexico lacks both capacity and political will to monitor livestock diseases, but the situation is hardly better north of the border, where surveillance is a failed patchwork of state jurisdictions, and corporate livestock producers treat health regulations with the same contempt with which they deal with workers and animals. Similarly, a decade of urgent warnings by scientists has failed to ensure the transfer of sophisticated viral assay technology to the countries in the direct path of likely pandemics. Mexico has world-famous disease experts, but it had to send swabs to a Winnipeg lab in order to ID the strain's genome. Almost a week was lost as a consequence.

But no one was less alert than the disease controllers in Atlanta. According to the Washington Post, the CDC did not learn about the outbreak until six days after Mexico had begun to impose emergency measures. There should be no excuses. The paradox of this swine flu panic is that, while totally unexpected, it was accurately predicted. Six years ago, Science dedicated a major story to evidence that "after years of stability, the North American swine flu virus has jumped onto an evolutionary fasttrack".

Since its identification during the Great Depression, H1N1 swine flu had only drifted slightly from its original genome. Then in 1998 a highly pathogenic strain began to decimate sows on a farm in North Carolina and new, more virulent versions began to appear almost yearly, including a variant of H1N1 that contained the internal genes of H3N2 (the other type-A flu circulating among humans).

Researchers interviewed by Science worried that one of these hybrids might become a human flu (both the 1957 and 1968 pandemics are believed to have originated from the mixing of bird and human viruses inside pigs), and urged the creation of an official surveillance system for swine flu: an admonition, of course, that went unheeded in a Washington prepared to throw away billions on bioterrorism fantasies.

But what caused this acceleration of swine flu evolution? Virologists have long believed that the intensive agricultural system of southern China is the principal engine of influenza mutation: both seasonal "drift" and episodic genomic "shift". But the corporate industrialisation of livestock production has broken China's natural monopoly on influenza evolution. Animal husbandry in recent decades has been transformed into something that more closely resembles the petrochemical industry than the happy family farm depicted in school readers.

In 1965, for instance, there were 53m US hogs on more than 1m farms; today, 65m hogs are concentrated in 65,000 facilities. This has been a transition from old-fashioned pig pens to vast excremental hells, containing tens of thousands of animals with weakened immune systems suffocating in heat and manure while exchanging pathogens at blinding velocity with their fellow inmates.

Last year a commission convened by the Pew Research Center issued a report on "industrial farm animal production" that underscored the acute danger that "the continual cycling of viruses … in large herds or flocks [will] increase opportunities for the generation of novel virus through mutation or recombinant events that could result in more efficient human to human transmission." The commission also warned that promiscuous antibiotic use in hog factories (cheaper than humane environments) was sponsoring the rise of resistant staph infections, while sewage spills were producing outbreaks of E coli and pfiesteria (the protozoan that has killed 1bn fish in Carolina estuaries and made ill dozens of fishermen).

Any amelioration of this new pathogen ecology would have to confront the monstrous power of livestock conglomerates such as Smithfield Farms (pork and beef) and Tyson (chickens). The commission reported systemic obstruction of their investigation by corporations, including blatant threats to withhold funding from cooperative researchers .

This is a highly globalised industry with global political clout. Just as Bangkok-based chicken giant Charoen Pokphand was able to suppress enquiries into its role in the spread of bird flu in southeast Asia, so it is likely that the forensic epidemiology of the swine flu outbreak will pound its head against the corporate stonewall of the pork industry.

This is not to say that a smoking gun will never be found: there is already gossip in the Mexican press about an influenza epicentre around a huge Smithfield subsidiary in Veracruz state. But what matters more (especially given the continued threat of H5N1) is the larger configuration: the WHO's failed pandemic strategy, the further decline of world public health, the stranglehold of big pharma over lifeline medicines, and the planetary catastrophe of industrialised and ecologically unhinged livestock production.

UNQUOTE.

It's interesting to note that Davis identifies the farm written about in the article below about the possible ground zero as a Smithfield subsidiary.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090428/ap_on_re_la_am_ca/lt_swine_flu_mexico_ground_zero

My own thoughts:

Personally, I don't believe in the death toll figure quoted by the Mexican government, amounting to 100+, considering that there hasn't been any deaths reported in other countries where they have reported infection, pointing to the likelyhood that the pig flu is treatable once recieved proper medical attention. Not enough how, when, where these reported deaths took place is coming out from government sources, just the figures.

There was a news article that says the deaths are probably due to pnuemonia, a common enough complication from the common flu. Some reports are saying the death really related to swine flu in the twenties (in a country of 100 million, mind you.)

Last month, I had to fill every container I had in the house with water because the federal government announce a four day water closure in Mexico City. It turned out to be a political game to discredit the capital's administration headed by an opposition hope to be president politician. That's how low politics can fall. There's a mid-term election coming up in July that will hold much weigh on which party will win the next presidential elections. Every party is pulling out some pretty dirty tricks.

Schools were ordered shut across the Mexcan capital city last week and they will open on May 6. I wonder if the Calderon administration believe they have some kind of magic power over the flu so that it will stop infecting on that day?

Rice in Thailand

Some comments and strange ideas about rice are circulating the Nation blog space, so I'm doing some research. There's a lot of interesting things that can be said about the history of rice and it's connection with Thailand. I'm posting a list of links here as food for thought.

According to UNCTAD, Thailand produces only 4.4% of world's production of rice, but last year we exported a third of world rice exports. It was a bonus year because of the global food crisis earlier in the year, and Thailand didn't have production problems like other countries. The high prices is quite likely to come down in the near future once production picks up normally in that bigger 96% of world production.

The structure for exporting Thai rice was built over several decades with a strong government hand. We were lucky that it turned out well. There were once dark times of stock piling, corruption and price distortions and very little of the benefit from exports going to the farmers. With some remarkable people, determined to be fair and inclusive, it got worked out. I remember a very impressionable visit to Kamnan Song's central market for rice at Nakornsawan in the late 80s. Truck loads of rice arriving during the wee hours of the morning before sunrise, and farmers who drove those trucks in themselves auctioning their rice for the best price. The Nation could do service in writing a story about how that market has evolved if I may say so.

Thailand does have a reserve of rice, controlled by the Ministry of Commerce. It is used for stablilizing the domestic price of rice when prices go too high, also used for foreign aid to poor countries. I think it would be a grave mistake to morph the value of rice (a food crop) into something else, especially, something so closely linked to just monetary value, as proposed by Khun Tanong in his blog "When the UK prints money" . Look at what happened to the price of corn when the US decided to use it for biofuel. People down in Mexico were suffering because their staple food was corn (imported from US). (Thais can count their blessing that we never took the route of Mexico and completely believed WTO's and US free trade agenda and destroyed their agriculture sector to build a "industrial sector" for export in order to import food!)

Thailand also has an Agricultural Futures Exchange of Thailand where rice futures can be traded. This and technology have helped new players enter the market recently, all hopefully playing a role in increasing market efficiency and maybe production quality.

However, the idea of a rice bond, which "wch" posted as comment on an earlier post of mine had me intrigued. After some research on the net, I discovered that it is quite plausible. The Bank of Canada and some other academic institutions have funded researches about commodity-backed bonds as a way to help developing countries ease their debt problems. My protest against that would be that a rice bond is first of all a financial instrument and doesn't really help the farmer, it would only be useful as a hedge for government debt, which in my view the government should really be going easy on creating more public debt for future generations.

"Le Monde Diplomatique" in its March 2009, English editions printed "Fragrant Thai Rice" by Xavier Monthéard. He opens his article with a bit of drama, but I like how the article was started with a quote, ‘We need to find a balance between profit and holding the country back’.

Another noteworthy site is the Thai Rice Foundation (thairice.org), its list of webpages related to rice.

Asian Financial Chiefs Move to Fight Crisis

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/22/AR2009022201964.html?hpid=topnews

Blogging, identities, and ideal web space

When I was introduced to blogging some five years ago in a media class, I spent a lot of time surfing other people's blogs.  I was lucky to have others guide me to where the best blogs can be found.   Through those guides and reading famous blogs, good blogs, bad blogs, I discovered different kinds of pitfalls of blogging and learnt what to expect, what not to expect.  My few blog companions guided me to understand certain laws of media and we had a great time witnesssing the blogosphere bloom to its highest ideal in the political campaign of Howard Dean. 

As all things that go up, they eventually settle down, as did that first generation of quality blogs.  When a few journalists and famous bloggers were dramatically exposed as liars, blogging became just another quirky mode of expression as the internet moved on to exploring other forms of connectivity.   

Occasionally checking in on the emerging Thai blogosphere, I was reluctant to join in any group because they seemed to be dominated by certain identities and technical structures that were limiting for a true free or equal expression of personal thoughts.  However, out there in the wider blogosphere it was difficult to find fellow bloggers who shared similar focus or interests and it was getting boring just talking to myself.  Usually when there was some kind of crisis going on I would feel more strongly the need to join in some conversation in trying to make sense out of the world, so that was what brought me to this space here.  Now I'm starting to have some doubts.

I don't know if it's too much to hope that the Nationa Weblog will move towards a kind of space for grassroot "journalism" to develop as it did with the Jordanians or the Koreans.  Even a lesser ideal of simply becoming a space where people will have diverse and entertaining expressions over a variety of topics would be an encouragement to keep blogging.  Maybe, I'm too "new" in this space and expect too much, but I cannot help but worry when I see development of flamingfueds that just simply bring down the quality of any forum.  One was recently started around the question of identity, an Achilles' heel of this narcissistic media form.  

Here's a bit of my say about identity, (through the luxury allowed by this form of other people's words):

On the blogging identity: 

http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/exchange/node/2412

Something about identity and transparency: 

http://www.buzzmachine.com/2006/04/21/identity/

An entertaining "Pop Psychological Look at Blogger Identity": 

http://www.black-iris.com/2007/08/07/a-pop-pscychological-look-at-blogger-identities/

An example of about what/how to blog: 

http://www.twincities.com/ci_11225012

In the general interest of having a geniunely interesting blogging space, would I be too naive to plead with my fellow bloggers here to let's be constructive and avoid falling into these degrading pitfalls and waste of blogspace?

Some thoughts about Rich Dad's philosophy

This is a response to a question from Khun Leela. (I find unrelated remarks refreshing and good ideas for blogposts, thank you.)

When Rich Dad's books first hit the bookstores somewhere between 1997 and 2000, being the book nerd I was, I read it. It was advertised as bestseller and the word "rich" often sparks curiosity, it also was an easy read, so why not?

My first reaction to his book was, "Yeah, this kind of thing would only works in the States". So I shelved the book and eventually gave it away to clear my bookshelf. As someone who has loved reading from a young age, I've slowly learnt not to take books too seriously because it's usually written for a certain kind of audience and not necessarily relevant universally. Years were spent thinking I belonged to that world of thought, always feeling there was so much to read, so much I didn't know. Years spent living in an imaginary world; one would be quick to say. Until, I came back to my homeland, and it was in a Buddhist ethics class taught in Thai that taught me how question the authenticity of books and other worldviews. (These words of wisdom are in this other blogspot.)

Since shelving Rich Dad's book, I've noticed how it has risen to fame. In Thailand, it was translated into Thai, and I found myself going to one gathering of people who were playing his popular board game, Cashflow, translated into Thai as well. It was quite entertaining. In my table (there were about 10 something tables of players in the room), we were about maybe 4-5 "teams" (you could either play individually or with a partner). What was funny was the couple opposite me, a husband and wife team. Each time they threw the dice and made decisions we were hearing a bit of their life story and their financial conflicts.

The book recently came back to attention when my then 17-year-old son found some inspiration in it. So I re-read it again and discover this whole network of websites and other Cashflow playing groups, even one right around the corner where I live in another totally different country and language.

I think the book and its related products did some good for all those millions who read and believed. One, it got you seriously thinking about how financially literate you were. Most of us are pretty hopeless, even an economist like me. For myself, I figured it simply wasn't our culture, but when being financially hopeless starts to hurt you when you are looking at your retirement prospects, you pay more attention to these things and try to get something out of it.

Two, Rich Dad's books got people who weren't raised in business-oriented environment like my son to think about the possibility of making business. As he grew, and fast he did, he eventually dropped the book and started reading other more worthwhile things but still keeping his goal to one day be a successful businessman.

Would I recommend the book, Rich Dad's philosophy? Well, I'm already compromised by writing this blog. However, I've included below some interesting links about the book that I knew were there on the internet but never felt compelled to search them out until Khun Leela asked the intriguing question. We can all make up our own minds once we've clearly looked at more sources other than the well known.

"Why people buy Rich Dad, Poor Dad's nonsense": http://www.slate.com/?id=2067175

Analysis of Kiyosaki's book: http://johntreed.com/Kiyosaki.html

What wikipedia says: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Dad,_Poor_Dad