The new flu…. Former swine flu… industrial farming…

I am very tired today. I really shouldn’t read the new papers, nor listen to the radio…. Or read emails for that matter. Why? Because today the crazy is really hitting me… “What do you think about this?” “Dr C, do you think we should stop travelling” “can I still eat pork?”. No, I am not that important and these are more often friends than anything who ask but still… it is a bit tiresome. Not that they ask. No. More so that the articles I read are so full of mistakes and faults. So much information that might be more harmful and scaring than other things. (“Country X only has antivirals for 25 % of the population so how are all going to be saved?” Do we really need to tell that now?! Very few countries have antivirals for 100% of their population… and yes, this might mean people will die.)

And I can’t really intervene. Why? Because I work where I work and it is not my place to let my voice be heard in the world. And this time, it will not be taken lightly to “correct information”. So, I am taking it all in and venting to some colleges with the same problem and then we wait some….

Let’s just say that I have a huge thing to say about the statement “this is fault of industrial farming”. No. There are plenty of problems with “industrial farming” but this is not due to industrial farming. This outbreak is due to the nature of influenza virus to spread, pick up segments and to find itself in new hosts since that is what viruses do.

Sure, you can argue that it wouldn’t have been “made” if it wasn’t for industrial farming. That is not true either. Reassortment viruses were found before industrial farming. Viruses have been known to mutate and move around before. Why not to this extent? Well, let’s go with that we don’t know that since we can’t really pin point outbreaks historically as well as we would want to. (I am clearly leaving out that people didn’t fly in planes nor boats to the amount of people when 1918 hit or the time we live in today.)

My key thing with bashing the “against industrial farming” however is another thing. See, I had this conversation with a British guy back in the days when I was still a slightly naïve person who wanted to save the world (yes, I am more bitter now and slightly more cynical). I firmly stated that all industrial farming should be abolished “for the sake of the animals” and that we should go back to small farming. (I still think it would be good to go to smaller farms, definitely.) The guy looked at me and said “so, poor people shouldn’t be allowed to eat meat then?”. [I’ll make this into discussion since I can’t really write it as well otherwise. I am I and British guy is B.]

I: (shaking my head) Of course everyone should be allowed to eat meat.
B: How’s that going to work though? You are going to have less meat in production.
I: well, everyone can buy meat
B: demand and supply my dear. If the demand is higher than the supply the price goes up. Therefore, the poorer will not be able to purchase meat.
I: (quiet and since I come from the leftish country…) maybe we can do food stamps. Everyone is just entitled to meat 4 times a week… then it will be not due to economic factors
B: that is what you call a Black Market. You seriously think that system wouldn’t be used for exchanging stamps… or buying stamps… it will be more like the WWII or for that matter, when I grew up we only had chicken on Sundays because we couldn’t afford it. You have to face it, in these capitalistic times, the only thing that will happen is that poor people will not be able to eat meat.

[Then we ended the conversation after I had tried to argue a bit more…]

Needless to say he was overly pessimistic and a devoted capitalistic follower. I was a tad bit naïve and didn’t really know how to attack it. Today I would say “we can take that price on meat goes up a bit – if it means better care for animals.” It is also true that we have a slight over production of meat in many countries… not to mention the key instrument for all this to happen; legislation.

What would change a lot of this industrial farming, apart from people stopping to buy the “farmed meat” and opting for the more organic option (of course this is at the moment a lot to do with money…. And if you know/care about animals), is laws from the government that forces the Industry (is there anymore negative charged word?) to make changes.

And that is what we can hope that this discussion leads to. And to be fair, some of the organic market needs to change too. All use of antibiotics is not bad…. Just not use of antibiotics all the time…

The last point of this slightly venting like post, the vaccine production for different countries. I am so very sorry that my own government has decided not to support the building of a vaccine factory in collaboration with our three neighboring countries. Instead, we are relying on GSK to provide us with vaccine when it is available. The factory of GSK in another neighboring country… even though all research so far indicates that in a real situation there is no evidence that a country would give doses of vaccines to other countries before making it available to its own population. I don’t blame them; we are all closest to ourselves in a time of crises. It is just unfathomable that the government didn’t want to join the other three to do something that would benefit not only us four but even the developing world since the factory would make vaccines for them too….

With that, I will leave work and try not to listen to the news until tomorrow morning when I will get another update on all this.