02/09/06, Alanna Mitchell, Human idiocy, the deadliest plague
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Pandemonium:
Bird Flu, Mad Cow Disease,
and Other Biological Plagues
of the 21st Century
By Andrew Nikiforuk
Viking, 304 pages, $34
This book is born of outrage. And not the sort that has matured to sorrow or resignation, but the type that wants to box us soundly about the ears and tell us to shape up before it's too late.
That means that Pandemonium: Bird Flu, Mad Cow Disease, and Other Biological Plagues of the 21st Century, by Andrew Nikiforuk, is written as a meticulously researched litany of human idiocy. Homo sapiens has become Homo economicus, in Nikiforuk's assessment, the rapacious species that values individual profit above collective safety, ignorance above knowledge.
The heroes are a cabal of hand-wringing medical and scientific Cassandras, those able to foretell the biologically doomed future but whose prophecies are destined to fail to prevent the carnage.
The book, as Nikiforuk tells us in the introduction, is about "biological bombs," the "hidden microterrorists on our global doorstep." These include avian flu, anthrax, mad-cow disease, SARS, the truly horrifying hospital superbug, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), and various other viruses, bacteria and prions still unknown but poised to strike.
Nikiforuk catalogues the destruction some of these bugs have wrought on civilization, livestock and wild animal populations. And, like the Cassandras he quotes, he warns that our society is woefully unprepared for when -- not if -- new pandemics will appear and take a scythe to the world's people.
It's bracing, scary stuff. And the problem is, it's real. Nikiforuk, who is one of Canada's foremost writers of non-fiction, and who has made a career out of cataloguing uncomfortable truths, has exposed an imminent threat to civilization.
Crowded together in cities as never before, linked by intercontinental flights, plagued by ill-informed public-health policies, bound to thoughtless free-trade laws that encourage the movement of live creatures, humanity is just so much ectoplasm waiting for a fatal disease.
If the next pandemic is mild, Nikiforuk says in his epilogue, it will infect 25 to 30 per cent of the world's population and kill two million to seven million people. That's the best-case scenario. If it's on the scale of the 1918-1919 killer flu, which targeted the young and healthy, the global death toll could reach 300 million, he says, adding: "The death rate among pregnant women, the most vulnerable, could approach a horrific rate of 70 per cent. Such a rare and unique event would change the world."
Nikiforuk points an accusing finger at the North American invention of factory farms. "Trade has shuttled all sorts of invasive pathogens around the world, and factory farming has helped incubate and concentrate them," he writes. Today, about 70 per cent of the world's chickens and nearly half the pigs and cattle are raised in "factories totally separate from the landscape."
Not only that, but they are raised to grow meat fast, with the costly aid of pharmaceuticals, steroids and antibiotics. And that means "around the world, dumb meat machines raised in climate-controlled buildings are now replacing smart livestock that didn't need vaccines, antibiotics, or formulated rations to live well. . . . Every week, an average of two creatures, representing hundreds of years of careful breeding for climate adaptation and disease resistance, disappear. The loss is irreversible." In a way, it's endearing that Nikiforuk's outrage over all of this is still hot. It is a sign that he still has hope that we can prevent the worst. The day Nikiforuk lapses into sheer cynicism, when he tells us how badly we have messed up but does not spank us soundly and tell us to do better -- well, that's the day to throw in the towel.
But where to turn? Nikiforuk places little faith in government or industry. Regulations are unlikely to change the course of disaster, and the world in which science and medicine influence policy is simply a dream, in his books.
The salvation is the individual. In the final part of his book, delightfully named A Canticle for Local Living, Nikiforuk calls on consumers to think globally by buying locally. Forget the exotic pet trade. Forgo imported meats, vegetables and fruit. Buy goods grown and made locally, preferably without chemicals. Instead of thinking of the world as a tiny, two-dimensional monopoly board, start to understand it as a complex series of three-dimensional ecosystems and then approach them with humility.
In other words, take a biological view of the world. The bottom line is not the hallowed financial bottom line, but rather the preservation of our species and its life-support systems.
The best lines in this book make up item 28 in his canticle: "Question the promoters of globalization; they don't hold degrees in biology or ecology. Ask them where they plan to retire."
Pandemonium is not a book for the faint of heart. It's not easy reading. After you finish it, you may never eat chicken again. You'll probably avoid hospitals for the rest of your life, even as a visitor. On the other hand, if you and many others read this book and take Nikiforuk's advice, it may just save your life.
Alanna Mitchell is the author of Dancing at the Dead Sea: Tracking the World's Environmental Hotspots. She is working on a book about the health of the global ocean, to be published in 2008.
Bird Flu, Mad Cow Disease,
and Other Biological Plagues
of the 21st Century
By Andrew Nikiforuk
Viking, 304 pages, $34
This book is born of outrage. And not the sort that has matured to sorrow or resignation, but the type that wants to box us soundly about the ears and tell us to shape up before it's too late.
That means that Pandemonium: Bird Flu, Mad Cow Disease, and Other Biological Plagues of the 21st Century, by Andrew Nikiforuk, is written as a meticulously researched litany of human idiocy. Homo sapiens has become Homo economicus, in Nikiforuk's assessment, the rapacious species that values individual profit above collective safety, ignorance above knowledge.
The heroes are a cabal of hand-wringing medical and scientific Cassandras, those able to foretell the biologically doomed future but whose prophecies are destined to fail to prevent the carnage.
The book, as Nikiforuk tells us in the introduction, is about "biological bombs," the "hidden microterrorists on our global doorstep." These include avian flu, anthrax, mad-cow disease, SARS, the truly horrifying hospital superbug, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), and various other viruses, bacteria and prions still unknown but poised to strike.
Nikiforuk catalogues the destruction some of these bugs have wrought on civilization, livestock and wild animal populations. And, like the Cassandras he quotes, he warns that our society is woefully unprepared for when -- not if -- new pandemics will appear and take a scythe to the world's people.
It's bracing, scary stuff. And the problem is, it's real. Nikiforuk, who is one of Canada's foremost writers of non-fiction, and who has made a career out of cataloguing uncomfortable truths, has exposed an imminent threat to civilization.
Crowded together in cities as never before, linked by intercontinental flights, plagued by ill-informed public-health policies, bound to thoughtless free-trade laws that encourage the movement of live creatures, humanity is just so much ectoplasm waiting for a fatal disease.
If the next pandemic is mild, Nikiforuk says in his epilogue, it will infect 25 to 30 per cent of the world's population and kill two million to seven million people. That's the best-case scenario. If it's on the scale of the 1918-1919 killer flu, which targeted the young and healthy, the global death toll could reach 300 million, he says, adding: "The death rate among pregnant women, the most vulnerable, could approach a horrific rate of 70 per cent. Such a rare and unique event would change the world."
Nikiforuk points an accusing finger at the North American invention of factory farms. "Trade has shuttled all sorts of invasive pathogens around the world, and factory farming has helped incubate and concentrate them," he writes. Today, about 70 per cent of the world's chickens and nearly half the pigs and cattle are raised in "factories totally separate from the landscape."
Not only that, but they are raised to grow meat fast, with the costly aid of pharmaceuticals, steroids and antibiotics. And that means "around the world, dumb meat machines raised in climate-controlled buildings are now replacing smart livestock that didn't need vaccines, antibiotics, or formulated rations to live well. . . . Every week, an average of two creatures, representing hundreds of years of careful breeding for climate adaptation and disease resistance, disappear. The loss is irreversible." In a way, it's endearing that Nikiforuk's outrage over all of this is still hot. It is a sign that he still has hope that we can prevent the worst. The day Nikiforuk lapses into sheer cynicism, when he tells us how badly we have messed up but does not spank us soundly and tell us to do better -- well, that's the day to throw in the towel.
But where to turn? Nikiforuk places little faith in government or industry. Regulations are unlikely to change the course of disaster, and the world in which science and medicine influence policy is simply a dream, in his books.
The salvation is the individual. In the final part of his book, delightfully named A Canticle for Local Living, Nikiforuk calls on consumers to think globally by buying locally. Forget the exotic pet trade. Forgo imported meats, vegetables and fruit. Buy goods grown and made locally, preferably without chemicals. Instead of thinking of the world as a tiny, two-dimensional monopoly board, start to understand it as a complex series of three-dimensional ecosystems and then approach them with humility.
In other words, take a biological view of the world. The bottom line is not the hallowed financial bottom line, but rather the preservation of our species and its life-support systems.
The best lines in this book make up item 28 in his canticle: "Question the promoters of globalization; they don't hold degrees in biology or ecology. Ask them where they plan to retire."
Pandemonium is not a book for the faint of heart. It's not easy reading. After you finish it, you may never eat chicken again. You'll probably avoid hospitals for the rest of your life, even as a visitor. On the other hand, if you and many others read this book and take Nikiforuk's advice, it may just save your life.
Alanna Mitchell is the author of Dancing at the Dead Sea: Tracking the World's Environmental Hotspots. She is working on a book about the health of the global ocean, to be published in 2008.
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