Grandes granjas, grandes gripes

Thanks to advances in food science and production, agribusinesses have been able to devise new ways to grow more food and get it to more places faster. There is no shortage of news in the press about the hundreds of thousands of hybrid poultry (genetically identical animals) locked in mega sheds, fattened, slaughtered, processed and shipped to the other side of the globe in a matter of months. Less well known are the deadly pathogens that emerge and mutate in these specialized agri-environments. In fact, many of the most dangerous new diseases in humans are due to our food systems, such as Campylobacter, Nipah virus, Q fever, hepatitis E, and numerous variants of the flu. In Big Farms, Big Flu, the first work to explore infectious disease, agriculture, economics and science together, Rob Wallace juxtaposes gruesome phenomena such as attempts to produce featherless chickens, microbial time travel and Ebola, and also offers various more sensible alternatives. Some initiatives such as agricultural cooperatives, integrated pathogen management, and mixed crop and livestock systems, for example, are already outside the agribusiness network.