Llega el monstruo

Renowned activist and writer Mike Davis offers a terrifying forecast of a new global threat and sets the COVID-19 crisis in the context of previous viral catastrophes, such as the 1918 flu, which killed at least forty million people in three months, or the latest bird flu, a disastrously overlooked wake-up call and the blatant consequences of which we are suffering in the current devastating outbreak. The virus known as H5N1 is now endemic among poultry and wild bird populations in East Asia. An astonishingly lethal strain of flu that has the talent to transform to thwart the human immune system, and kills two out of every three people it infects. The World Health Organization is now warning that bird flu is about to mutate into a super-contagious form that could travel at pandemic speed, killing as many as 100 million people in two years. Using accessible and rigorous language, Davis reconstructs the scientific and political history of a developing viral apocalypse, exposing the central roles of agribusiness and fast food industries, supported by corrupt governments, in creating ecological conditions for the rise of this new plague.