'The Monster at Our Door'

The current hysteria over the bird flu has thrust the world into a panic-stricken frenzy with warnings of death and imminent disease. But for some, the virus is beneficial, advantageous and even downright profitable. Mike Davis, an American social commentator, urban theorist, sociographer and author of the new political history about avian flu, “The Monster at Our Door,” exposes the corruption and big business that has cultivated the ecological conditions for the advent of this latest plague.

Currently, only one company in the world produces the most effective antiviral protecting humans against the avian flu. Tamiflu, a neuraminidase inhibitor, is manufactured by Roche in a single pharmaceutical company in Switzerland. The political power Roche possesses over world health and the potential profits they stand to make from Tamiflu exemplify the disturbing influence that corporations have over the general public.

Pasadena Weekly: I read that Roche is planning to contract other companies to produce Tamiflu for them.
Mike Davis: Tamiflu has, obviously, become incredibly profitable for Roche. Roche, who is the most profitable pharmaceutical com-pany in the world, stands to make hundreds of thousands immediately, so they reluctantly conceded that they will license it to some other countries. But the Taiwanese blew the lid off this because Roche had always claimed that they were the only ones that could produce it, that it was an incredibly complex procedure. And the Taiwanese, recently, starting from scratch, were able to make Tamiflu in fifteen days. And of course, you can ask, if Taiwan can do this, why can’t the United States? The answer is that the United States government consistently supports big drug companies, their patents and rights, over public health. So, the Bush administration has cut a deal which will build a production facility in the US, but this won’t come on line anytime in the near future. If there were pandemic breakouts over the course of this winter, we would be unprotected.

Has the American poultry industry suffered from all of this?

The US poultry industry, led by Tyson, is the world’s poultry giant. They’ve actually been making out like bandits over avian flu. It means that they can fill the demand that their foreign competitors can’t. They’ve taken advantage of this to increase exports and it’s been very good for business. But beyond all that, there's a number of researchers and scientists who really wonder whether or not we should have industrial poultry or whether we should have this livestock revolution or whether we should concentrate chickens by the millions or pigs by the hundreds of thousands. Such population concentrations of genetically similar animals simply don’t exist in nature. And in creating that, we are basically tinkering with, Frankenstein-style, the ecology of diseases and increasing the likelihood that old diseases will return in more virulent forms than the new diseases could emerge.

So what do you think the message is? Do you think that we shouldn’t be living the way we’re living?

The original warning was AIDS and HIV, which was the product of deforestation and poverty and of urban growth in West Africa where you’re breaking down the remaining barriers between wild nature and cities. So basically, any wild viruses that infect other animals that haven’t had contact with humans now have contact with humans. At the same time, we’re essentially urbanizing domestic animals, putting them into enormous concentrations and that increases the virulence of traditional diseases. Humans basically didn’t have infectious diseases — maybe apart from the cold — until agriculture, until domestication, when large numbers of herd animals came together with large numbers of humans.

But we’re talking about meat, a worldwide big business. There’s no way to change or abolish an entire industry. Realistically, what can be done?

You see, globalization, instead of being accompanied by a corresponding growth of global public health and surveillance has actually been accompanied by the opposite. In the 1980s the structural adjustment program led to huge reductions in public spending in poor countries and it has decimated public health services. But even in the rich countries, like the United States, public health conditions have often gotten worse or failed to keep up with growth. So you’re globalizing the conditions of disease, but you’re failing to create an adequate network or infrastructure. And finally, we rely now almost entirely on the market to produce medicines, but Big Pharmas [the pharmaceutical industry] never found it possible to actually produce medicines that cure diseases like vaccines and antivirals and antibiotics. The development and supply of those is far behind the needs of the world. So HIV, AIDS is kind of like the first plank of globalization and avian flu could be the second and you can almost be certain that there will be others.

How can we deal with globalization and these pandemic diseases?

In the long run, there’s no way that you can isolate yourself biologically from the rest of the world. If we allow enormous populations of human beings to exist without minimal public health or sanitation, if we allow conditions like that to exist, it will incubate plagues and those plagues won’t acknowledge any difference between the rich and poor. So it becomes that our health depends on the health of poor citizens and it depends on the world in general until you’re ready to make adjustments in public health. And the single most important thing that needs to be done around the world, of course, is to address sanitation conditions or bring clean water in some form of sanitation to everybody. I believe that antivirals, vaccines and antibiotics should be available as a world lifeline and should be available for free. Pharmaceutical companies won’t produce them because they’re not profitable enough and I think that governments should.

Do you think that Bush will take advantage of the sudden interest in avian flu and use it as a political agenda?

Well, he’s doing damage control right now. There’s never been a potential epidemic or plague that’s had the kind of forewarning that this has. It’s much, in a way, like Katrina, where there was a scenario sketched out a long time ago. Everybody knew what needed to be done and the politicians didn’t do it. And the question is — why? Part of that answer is because the administration had other health priorities: abstinence education at the beginning of the administration; then after 9/11, the hypothetical bio-terrorist weapons like anthrax, plague and Ebola fever. We’ve developed very expensive vaccines for these things, where the threat is largely hypothetical, while ignoring the threats that everybody in public health is saying is the most likely.

It’s analogous to the war in Iraq right now. It seems like we are constantly fighting invisible battles. The government must begin to take responsibility.

I also think that pandemic planning and control of pandemic response needs to stay in the hands of health professionals and not to be turned over to FEMA or the Pentagon, which the president has indicated he might do. You will not defeat a pandemic plague with militarization; all you will do is create panic and hysteria. Centers of disease control should be in charge of avian flu response, not Donald Rumsfeld.