You may think bird flu is a disaster still waiting to happen, but in one way it is a disaster that already happened. One of the shoes dropped between October 2005 and May 2006 when the H5N1 subtyupe of highly pathogenic avian influnza spread to the poultry flocks of 50 countries. Since 2003 the outbreak has resulted in the slaughter of some 240 million birds. In 2005 it burst out of Asia and spread into Europe, the Middle East and Africa. So even without the "other shoe" dropping -- a change in the virus to allow easy transmissibility from human to human -- the damage already done is immense. The animal version of a pandemic, called a panzootic, is already underway. It is also a recipe for a human pandemic because in China, southeast asia and Indonesia people live in close contact with their animals, particularly poultry:
Asked to predict where the next outbreaks are likely to occur, Domenech said Indonesia is high on the list because a comprehensive system to monitor and cull infected birds has not yet been established. An effective system has been created in China, but with more than five billion ducks and chickens living in close proximity to humans, the risk there also remains real.[Joseph Domenech, chief veterinary officer for the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and a specialist on avian flu,] said that ducks in China are particularly worrying because scientists have found that some are "permanent reservoirs" for avian flu, meaning that they survive the disease and spread it to other birds as well as humans.
Also the risk of contamination between domestic and wild birds is high in China, he said. "In the rice paddies you see ducks, wild birds and humans all in close proximity," Domenech said.
In Turkey, where there was an outbreak in 2005, people live with ducks inside their homes in winter to keep the animals warm.
[snip]
Domenech noted that human contact with poultry varies greatly in different parts of the developing world. In Thailand, 80 percent of poultry are produced in industrial-scale poultry farms, which are largely bio-secure, while in Cambodia 80 percent of poultry production is small scale. (Irin)
The bird flu problem appears particularly urgent at the moment but it is part of a larger and equally urgent problem regarding the relationship of disease in animals and disease in humans. It is the subject of much discussion at the current experts meeting on bird flu in Bamako, Mali this week.
Experts meeting in Mali say the deadly H5N1 virus is just one of a plethora of diseases threatening animals and people around the world as global warming, intensive farming, increased travel and trade help dangerous microbes breed and spread.
"Avian flu is just one of many diseases that are impacting the continent (of Africa). The experts are telling us that other diseases are going to emerge or re-emerge," said Francois Le Gall, the World Bank's lead livestock specialist for Africa.
"Almost every year there is a new disease appearing, and 75 percent of these emerging or re-emerging diseases are coming from animals; 80 percent of those have zoonotic potential," he said in an interview.
Le Gall said such zoonoses -- animal diseases that humans can also catch -- included Rift Valley fever, rabies and anthrax.
"These could come together to create what the experts are calling 'the perfect microbial storm'," he said. (Reuters)
The problem is as old as the human species, but is now being amplified by two new factors, globalization and climate change. Globalization is bringing together people and animals that were once separated. Pathogens are traveling the same route as goods, services and people and with unprecedented speed. For example, West Nile disease may have been brought to the US in 1999 by a pet bird. The change in climate has meant that some pathogens are able to survive in environments that were previously inhospitable. Two examples are blue tongue in sheep and dengue fever and malaria in humans.
So the news is bad. But it isn't all bad.
Many people complain that any effort expended on bird flu has been a waste of money. Bird flu has not emerged to threaten humans. But humans are only one part of the equation and the other part, the animal side, is pertinent to humans, too. The animal panzootic did happen and may grow worse. Some of the investments to combat bird flu, if properly implemented, will be extremely valuable regarding the 75% of emerging infectious diseases that come from animals and spread to humans.
. . . Le Gall said progress being made to tackle the current bird flu outbreak by strengthening veterinary and human health monitoring systems around the world would temper the risk of an apocalyptic conflagration of diseases.
"All the measures we are using now are going to be useful to control all these emerging or re-emerging diseases -- like veterinary services, public health services," he said. (Reuters)
The meaning of an investment is an expenditure designed to pay off at some future time. Investing in national and international human and animal health infrastructures is not a waste of resources any more than buying an insurance policy is a waste of money. Insurance is an investment designed to protect you from threats that on average, actually happen, and when they do, result in serious or catastrophic loss. If people in the US invested as much in public health as they spend on insurance, we'd all be in much better shape.
Our insurance premiums might also be cheaper.
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"The change in climate has meant that some pathogens are able to survive in environments that were previously inhospitable. Two examples are blue tongue in sheep and dengue fever and malaria in humans."
I'm particularly interested in the climate change and malaria example. Is climate really that big a deal? I'm sure that it makes a difference. But surely the level of social and economic development makes a much bigger difference. According to the CDC at the end of the 19th century malaria was endemic up to the Candian border, and even today:
"In many temperate areas, such as western Europe and the United States, economic development and public health measures have succeeded in eliminating malaria. However, most of these areas have Anopheles mosquitoes that can transmit malaria, and reintroduction of the disease is a constant risk."
(see http://www.cdc.gov/malaria/history/eradication_us.htm
and http://www.cdc.gov/malaria/distribution_epi/distribution.htm )
This suggests to me that climate is not really the main determinant of malaria. The only way it can be made in to the main factor is by ignoring factors such as social and economic development that allow large scale water management, the effective application of pesticides, and so forth. No doubt anthropogenic climate change is real, and enough of a problem to do something about. But it seems to me its high profile has become a way of quietly writing off development as the most important means of overcoming malaria.
In Al Gore's film, "An Inconvenient Truth" he points out that many large cities in the "malaria belt" were purposely built at an altitude above that which was warm enough to breed mosquitoes; and that recent studies have shown that the small amount of global warming we've already experienced has now allowed mosquitoes to proliferate in areas surrounding those cities, bringing with them their vector borne diseases to the millions of inhabitants. Here in Hawaii where I live, down near the ocean, I am plagued with mosquitoes, but where I work, which is up in Volcano Village at 4000 ft altitude, there are none. So yes, temperature change does make a difference. There is also the matter of the permafrost in the vast tundra regions of North America and Siberia, which is melting now at unprecedented rates, not only creating vast bogs perfect for breeding mosquitoes, but also releasing ancient viruses caught in frozen lakes and bogs - some perhaps hundreds or thousands of years ago - which can infect migratory birds with new or reemergent diseases to which they have no prior exposure or immunity. And that is, indeed, and effect of global warming. Will you apply your principles of pesticides and development to overcome the mosquito borne zoonotic illnesses emerging from the vast wastelands of Siberia?
Revere or others: even without H5N1 becoming a human pandemic, what do you think the long term health effects will be on the human population in Indonesia, Korea, China and other severely affected areas due to loss of birds as resources (food, economic etc)? Starvation? Susceptibility to other diseases due to weakened health/poor diet? And let's say H5N1 disappeared as a threat to poultry altogether by becoming low path: How long would it take the poultry flocks to recover to their pre panzootic levels?
Mary,
'Will you apply your principles of pesticides and development to overcome the mosquito borne zoonotic illnesses emerging from the vast wastelands of Siberia?'
Yes, unless someone can come up with a better idea.
I have nothing against rational measures to mitigate global warming. But that's just about stopping problems getting worse.
Even without climate change much of the world suffers terribly from malaria, and even if we never emitted another gram of CO2 that wouldn't change on its own. I propose something like a 21st century version of what allowed the US and Europe to eliminate malaria in the 20th century (that's very rough - not a detailed plan, obviously).
Maybe you think that's just unrealistic, which is what I meant when I said some people seem prepared to write off development. I think the idea that climate change means giving up on the idea of making the world better (as opposed to just halting disaster) is a tragic mistake.
How do you propose ending malaria?
I'm not sure why you have the idea that climate change means giving up on the idea of making the world better. Perhaps you might define "better"? And Better for whom? I'm fairly sure, from what you've said, you mean by "better" more modernized, developed, industrialized. Well, I think you don't see the scope of the problems inherent in global climate change: bigger storms, rising sea levels, sinking port cities, droughts, floods, famines...the list goes on and on. There is little "development" can do now to stop the ocean from drowning the Maldives beneath the sea. Nor New York city, San Francisco, much of LA, most of Florida, Hong Kong, Sydney, and most of the major ports around the world.
Anyway, you ask how do I propose ending malaria? I don't. You can't possibly go to every swamp and pond and old tire in the world and spray them all down with malathion. Even if you could, you wouldn't kill all the mosquitoes, the eggs protected beneath the water would soon hatch, the larva grow and you'd soon have as many as before. I simply put forth the fact that we are going to have not only more malaria but more influenza and all sorts of other vector borne diseases due to the effects of global warming and that's a fact. I frankly don't think we can stop global warming either...it has gone past the critical point. This thawing of the permafrost may be that point...for as it thaws vast quantities of methane gas, from rotting vegetation trapped in the ice all these thousands of years, is now being released in a positive feedback loop that then increases global warming even more. Same with the melting of the glacial ice on mountains, in Greenland, Antarctica and the Arctic. The more it melts, the less reflection of solar energy from the ice surface and the more heat retained in the dark seas or land...thus faster and faster will the global temperature rise.
As for doing "what allowed the US and Europe to eliminate malaria in the 20th century", I presume you mean on their own soil? because we sure haven't eliminated it anywhere else. And in the US, there isn't very much of the country that is hospitable to malaria anyway...most of the states are too cold and too dry. Spraying a few thousand acres of swamp in Florida every few months is hardly the equivalent to spraying hundreds of thousands of square miles of tundra in Siberia and Canada...let alone India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Sub Saharan Africa, SouthEast Asia and Indonesia.
Anyway, sorry if I seem to rant at you, but I have been passionate about the global environmental issues for decades now, while complacency and economic concerns - not to mention illicit and expensive wars - took precedence every time. and now that it is in our face, as bad as we all predicted and then some, and probably too late to fix....
An Emerging Infectious Diseases publication http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/EID/vol12no04/05-0956.htm of April 20, 2006 by Laura H. Kahn, MD, MPH, MPP entitled "Confronting Zoonoses, Linking Human and Veterinary Medicine" presented a cogent argument for reviving the "one medicine" concept. This is where human medicine marries with veterinary medicine in a synergistic, upgraded collaborative approach to public health and biomedical research.
Prior to this in July 2005, the National Academies of Science National Research Council http://www8.nationalacademies.org/onpinews/newsitem.aspx?RecordID=11365 issued a report urging stronger efforts to recruit veterinarians and other scientists into veterinary research due to growing shortages in public health and basic veterinary researchers. There was recognition that the United States needs a more coordinated means of confronting new and emerging animal-borne diseases like bovine spongiform enchephalopathy, avian influenza and West Nile virus.
In November 2005, the British Medical Journal http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/331/7527/0-f and their counterpart veterinary medical journal, the Veterinary Record jointly published an issue devoted to considering the wider connections between animal and human health and to think about how the medical and veterinary medical professions might work more closely together for the benefit of patients of all species.
One prime collaborative, monumental public health example: In 1893, Dr. Theobald Smith, a physician, and Dr. F.L. Kilborne, a veterinarian, published a paper establishing that an infectious agent, Babesia bigemina, the cause of cattle fever, was transmitted by ticks. Their seminal work helped set the stage for Walter Reed's discovery of yellow fever transmission via mosquitoes.
A recent biomedical research collaboration of note: Drs. Rolf M. Zinkernagel, a physician from Switzerland and Peter C. Doherty, a veterinarian from Queensland, Australia, working together, discovered how the body's immune system distinguishes normal cells from virus-infected cells. For this they shared the Nobel Prize in 1996.
Unfortunately, the "one medicine" concept continues to languish in the world milieu of public health and biomedical research activities. There is no recognizable groundswell of support within the medical or public health community nothwithstanding the obvious need to expand this avenue for combating existing and emerging zoonoses, many of which are known as potential bioterrorism agents.
This idea needs to be embraced by all and acted upon with an increased level of urgency. Millions of human lives currently and in future generations could obviously be improved and/or saved as a result.
Bruce Kaplan, DVM (EIS63)
4748 Hamlets Grove Drive
Sarasota, Florida 34235
Phone/fax: 941.351.5014
E-mail: bkapdvm@verizon.net
We couldn't agree more with Dr. Kaplan, which was one of the premises of the post. We have written about this before and we will again. Humans are animals, too. We live together on this planet and we affect each other.
I wonder if research is progressing optimistically toward producing an element in the "food" of bugs to disable their ability to transmit the primary diseases we fear? Could this be something humans ingest to lie dormant in our bodies to be picked up by the bug when it bites us? Something along the line of the anti-crawling bug stuff that one can put out for the bug to take back home and ingest that either sterilizes them or is an antiviral in their own system. I do realize the scope needed, but just wondered about the theory.
LEG: I'm not sure what bug you are referring to, but a vaccine works in essentially that way.
One small but important point to mary in Hawaii... Arthropods do not breath like vertebrates. This is important. It's not only the method - more osmotic through their abdomens - but their muscle attachments to their exoskeleton means the ratio of O2 to movement means they need more O2 per movement then vertebrates. The lack of oxygen made a huge change in insect populations at the end of Devonian Period... Was it a meteor or excessive subcontinental and oceanic burps of methane, sulfurous compounds, and CO2, which increased the global temperature and a much lower oxygen count? The wonderfully large dragonflies (found in fossils in places like Oklahoma with 18 inch wingspans) went extinct because the content of the atmospheric oxygen decreased... One source said... oxygen dropped sea level amounts to our present 10,000 foot levels. It slowly returned to what is believed we experience today... but never to the concentrations which allowed the super large flying insects.
So, going up to higher altitudes means you can acclimate to lower O2 concentrations but the mozzies can't.
We are also entering a phase in the orbit of the earth in relation to the sun and we are closer to it now than we were ten years ago. In ten years more, we will be even closer. No one can say definitively AND WITH PROOF that the total effect of humanity on the earths temp can be attributed to more than about a degree of temp across the last century. Crocodiles used to swim in Greenland and it was one heck of a lot earlier than we were around... So what did we have doing that, farting dinosaurs?
We just have to adapt to what is happening and what is coming. Methane burps, trees dying, termites eating them and producing methane. Kill the cows who produce more than we can ever imagine. Will it change anything to stop all emissions or is just flat because we have too many people on this planet or an orbit that is going from elliptical to a more round one around the sun. Too many people? Anyone willing to leave quietly? Do we really have the techology to stop what we are doing or is it even necessary?
What if its a normal cycle and that one degree is suddenly removed, massive global cooling?. I cant say one way or the other and neither can they.
Frankly I think mankind is going up onto the menu as nature takes its course. Calling it screwing up or polluting the earth or whatever. Citing Al Gore in Tenneesse his home state is like citing Bill Clinton at a Republican fund raiser by the way. An Inconvienient Truth was pure hokey and they knew it when they made it. I saw it and they forecasted unbridled hurricanes and typhoons. We have gotten neither. Is the environment changing? Yep. But it would seem that the geolgic record is being circumented in lieu of the bullshit facts. Each side cites bullshit when the geologic record says another. AGAIN, no definitive science to establish what is really going on. If either side is wrong it will manifest itself soon enough rather than this big tip over that some esconce. Its going to be one hell of a ride for those that make it.
And just for fun... here is this article...
http://jeb.biologists.org/cgi/content/abstract/201/8/1043
Interesting point, tardigrade. However although the giant winged insects may have perished when oxygen levels dropped - having much higher oxygen demands due to their size than smaller arthropods (surface area/volume ratio makes a big difference with an inefficient osmotic mechanism to get 02 delivered around the body) - all the little arthropods apparently survived okay. So I am not sure if O2 level is relevant to mosquitoes not being prevalent above certain altitudes. It may be true for very high altitudes, but I know there were lots and lots of mosquitoes up in the mountains of So. California during the summer, and that was at altitudes of 6 to 7000 ft. The Al Gore film cited research that showed mosquitoes are now definitely being found in large numbers in these higher altitude cities that used to be above the mosquito zone. I do not know what the altitude is, perhaps 4000 or 5000 ft, but the point is he altitude didn't change, nor did the 02 levels increase: the only change cited (although something else might have been overlooked)was increase in air temperature.
MRK....I cited al gore's film as it is just the most recent in a ton of research that I have read and studied IN DEPTH over the years. This is not just my passion, it's my job. I know it very well. The film was on my mind because I had just shown it to my class. Many people will maintain the posture of ass up, head in the sand eternally on this issue, because it means our entire premise, our entire societal impetus of buy buy buy and have have have and your only value is what you own, and the only healthy economy is one that is continuously growing, etc. is wrong. Just flat wrong. We have been socialized to believe that this, the "great American way" is the best way, the way all other countries should emulate. Strong, powerful, greedy slothful ignorant overweight and flatulent. And in debt up to the eyeballs. Plus most people slept through their science classes and just don't get it and don't want to get it, so they say it is all bs.
You say the lack of hurricanes this year means the claim there will be more strong storms due to global warming was all a lie? This is an el nino year, that's all. It mitigates and changes ocean currents, and thus the weather, temporarily. Including hurricanes. Look it up. Try NOAA.
Yet at the same time you take this one year anomaly as proof the environmentalists are wrong about increasing hurricanes, you cite the geologic time scale to prove that they are wrong about the causes of global warming.
You can't play it both ways. But you do.
Frankly, I don't give a damn if I convince you or anyone else anymore, because it is too late. The species who will be most hurt by this will be humans, and time will prove it to you. I just advise my students not to buy any ocean front property.
"In Thailand, 80 percent of poultry are produced in industrial-scale poultry farms, which are largely bio-secure, while in Cambodia 80 percent of poultry production is small scale."
Interesting. Biosecure? Which country has had the greater problem, both in poultry and humans? Biosecure indeed.
Love you MIH. You are probably right as I read that there are like 3000 species of something going by the wayside each yr. Ok, but are we the cause? Maybe, but nature seems to be responding to that two legged moderately smart monkey that can do research. Either way, one of us is going to be proven wrong defiintively in a few hundred years if the biology of the planet doesnt take us out. Sure, try to do what you can when you can but I think at this juncture in time when there is either a new or old nemesis popping up that likes humans for lunch, that we shouldnt worry. We are going to get smacked and hard by something very soon. Big wars on the planet are over and there is no system for survival of the fittest to take over. So the biologicals are likely going to do it for us. Its been just six hundred years since there was a super-pandemic. We are due for a regularly scheduled pandemic, and a super-pandemic too.
As for the anomalies. Everything is anomaly now. Forty-year hurricane cycle is not a myth, its shown. We have a one off and for those of you who want to see the reason its so cold in the US take a look at the following.... There's the El Nino in that big bright center part. It would be warmer if it were closer to S. America. It just started drifting for no particular reason off to the west and it was the reason we didnt get smacked this year. Our coldest recorded winter had it almost into the Phillipines. Everything from the orbit of the sun, human effects have to be studied and 100 year of full blown studying just doesnt cut it when you are speaking of something that takes sometimes 100,000 years to establish itself. We do know that in 50,000 years we will be under a cake of ice on this planet 200 feet thick because of that orbit. Just a few hundred thousand miles farther away and we get popsicled. Funny thing is that we will actually have more hurricanes and typhoons from it as the thermohaline cycle stops.
In the seventies they said we were going into a global cooling cycle. Of course it was looney because it was based on crap data. Could it be they are wrong again?
Ooops. It didnt record the URL so here it is typed in manually for you. The big reddish orange spot is where the El Nino is welling to the surface which is also a debated issue as it shoals off and if the currents are pushing against Micronesia it forces the warm water to stay near the surface. Or is it upwelling, or is it a hydraulic action...Damn... Where is Al when I need him?
http://www.wunderground.com/tropical/
love you too, but that's not el nino (the URL you posted). Try http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2006/s2753.htm
And the science of el nino is not that mysterious and confused. Normally the movement of the equatorial current and trade winds push warm equatorial water towards the western pacific, which then flows up and down along the asian and australian continents in two huge gyres. However the warm water gradually builds up into a super warm water mass near the phillipines which is actually higher than the cooler water upwelling near the coast of peru, and like water sloshing back and forth in a bathtub, it finally gets pulled "downhill", the surface hill of water reversing direction and flowing back towards the eastern pacific equatorial regions. This is "el nino", so called because the phenomena - which has been recorded for centuries in local lore - often begins around Christmas, so the Peruvian fisherman named it for the Christ Child. They noticed it as a dramatic decline in their fish catch, as it cancels the upwelling of deep, nutrition rich water along the peruvian coast, which causes negative food chain reactions making the larger fish go elsewhere to feed. It also reverses weather phenomena globally. enough science lesson for the day, I have students to go teach. But my point is, don't make it all seem like a bunch of unknown mysteries that foolish science types make wild guesses about in the dark, most of which are little more than cave man myths. The science is quite complex, and the enormous interactions worthy of chaos theory, and their patterns difficult to predict, one thing influencing another. But that's not the same as saying they are completely unpredictable or that it's all guess work and bogus.