Given the frenzy surrounding the effort to figure out the source of the COVID epidemic, a story by Brandon Keim at Nautilus expresses wonder that relatively scant attention has been paid to the origins of the H5N1 avian flu now circulating. (The one making eggs so expensive.) The piece makes the case that the clear culprit is commercial poultry and it warns that even if this particular strain ends up not posing much of a threat to humans, conditions are ripe for a future one to follow. H5N1 first popped up three decades ago in Guangdong, China, "a region rapidly adopting the industrial husbandry practices common to North America and western Europe," writes Keim. Since then, it has spread around the world, mutating to cattle and humans, though the total of number of human deaths is still a relatively low 460 or so.
"If we were to get our drafting table up here, and we wanted to design how to make great virulence, this would be how," says evolutionary ecologist Rob Wallace, who refers to poultry as "food for flu." Consider that the average chicken flock in America a century ago had 70 birds. Today, ever-consolidating farm operations have anywhere from 50,000 to 6 million chickens. The rise of High Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI) strains is linked to such crowded conditions and rapid turnover of birds. And while large-scale farms are already well established in developed nations, they're just getting started in middle-income and poorer nations. "There's going to be lots of issues around this, because industrial ag is just taking off," says Jay Graham, a public health scientist at UC-Berkeley. Read the full story. (Or check out other longform recaps.)
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