[http://metaphoricalweb.ning.com/profiles/blogs/swine-flu-end-of-the-mba]
While there are legitimate questions about the potential severity of
swine flu, it is still a dangerous flu for a simple reason - most flu
viruses in circulation are very minor variations on existing strains,
which means that most people who get the "flu" end up with symptoms
that have more to do with histimine reactions - runny eyes and nose,
aching joints, maybe a day in bed feeling lousy - then they're past it.

Swine flu, otherwise known for its genetic markers as H1N1, isn't an
existing, commonly circulating flu. It's relatively new although with
very old antecedents, which means that most people have no immunity to
it. This means that it will likely spread remarkably quickly, will
leave a significant portion of the population sick with it, and could
prove to be deadly even for adults.

What epidemiologists are discovering about this particular flu bug is
very disturbing - first, that it is a variant of the Spanish Flu virus
that accounted for more deaths worldwide than World War I, which was
waging at the time. Spanish flu was extraordinarily virulent, and when
it finally died out, it became very quiescent - effectively
disappearing altogether from the cloud of seasonal viruses that
normally lay people low in late winter.

However, in addition to this, it now appears that the term Swine Flu is
more apt than was even apparent on the surface - Swine flu itself first
appeared in hog factory farms in the 1990s, mutating rapidly in the
high density "population" of pigs kept in tiny pens little larger than
the pigs themselves. The flu wasn't lethal for pigs, and the particular
strain of swine flu that did jump to humans was of a variant that
didn't "catch", failing to reach critical mass or virulence to be a
true pandemic.

The early 1990s also saw the graduation of a crop of new business
school MBAs, instilled with a twin philosophy - automation was the wave
of the future, and one could apply the new thinking of the 1980s to
every business endeavor in order to transform these into
hyper-efficient super businesses, including agriculture. "Archaic"
farms that had established an understanding of animal husbandry over
centuries were quickly put out of business and bought out by
new "factory farms" that used a combination of technology,
mass-injections of antibiotics, close-confinement of the "stock" and
waste disposal being passed to the community.

The last issue eventually caused enough of a reaction that many of the
now very wealthy agribusiness concerns realized that setting up factory
farms in Mexico, which had far laxer environmental laws, lower labor
costs and generally a less empowered populace, might actually prove
more profitable (just as such farms had tended to relocate in states
that had lower taxes, environmental restrictions and wages originally).

In the end, this strategy, while increasing the overall production of
beef, pigs and chickens dramatically, also caused the price of these
meats to drop fairly dramatically, further eroding the ability of other
farms to compete and driving them out of business. Meanwhile, south of
the Rio Grande, these elongated factory farms proved the ideal breeding
ground for increasingly antibiotic strains of viruses. It was only a
matter of time before such a strain would jump to humans (indeed, it's
likely that Mexican workers at these plants were also virus
laboratories, providing many more opportunities for animal to human
transmission), and from there, additional vectors took it into the
general population - other kids playing with the infected kids bringing
home the virus usually without knowing they had it.

The epidemiology of viruses is well known, yet advanced knowledge of
medicine isn't going to help when you have viral factories that speed
up the evolution of viruses a thousand fold. Even if this particular
virus proves not to be especially virulent, the next one or the one
after that may well be. Perhaps it is time for us to start questioning
whether the factory farms are in fact yet another artifact of
the "greed is good" mentality that's proving to be so destructive to
the rest of society. Beyond the ethical dilemmas of keeping animals in
such conditions, these factory farms are increasingly proving to be
businesses that do harm than good, and as such at a minimum need to be
rethought in light of that, and perhaps even need to be abolished (not
just moved to places where people can't protest them).

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Posted By Kurt Cagle to Metaphorical Web at 5/07/2009 10:06:00 AM

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