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Paperback
Publisher: Holt Paperbacks
A “brilliant” and “fascinating” investigation of the looming avian flu pandemic—and how we arrived at the brink of a global health catastrophe—The New York Times
The virus known as H5N1 is now endemic among poultry and wild bird populations in East Asia. A flu strain of astonishing lethality, it has a talent for transforming itself to foil the human immune system—and kills two out of every three people it infects. The World Health Organization now warns that avian flu is on the verge of mutating into a super-contagious form that could travel at pandemic velocity, killing up to 100 million people within two years.
In The Monster at Our Door, the first book to sound this alarm, our foremost urban and environmental critic reconstructs the scientific and political history of this viral apocalypse in the making, exposing the central roles played by burgeoning slums, the agribusiness and fast-food industries, and corrupt governments. Mike Davis tracks the avian flu crisis as the virus moves west and the world remains woefully unprepared to contain it. With drug companies unwilling to invest in essential vaccines, severe shortages persist, a scenario Davis compares to the sinking Titanic: there are virtually no lifesaving resources available to the poor, and precious few for the rich, too.
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| Monster at the Door |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
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Awesome book. very well written & informative, well researched. It was recommended to me by an immunologist.
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| A more pessimistic view, but not without its reasons..... |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
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I just finished this book en route from a conference in New Mexico, where I gave a presentation on avian influenza, to my home in Tallahassee.
Mr. Davis' book is superbly footnoted and is an excellent digest of events and publications dealing with "bird flu" over the past nine years. His bashing of the Clinton and Bush (43) administrations aside, his work is a sobering "what if?" that all who deal with pandemic planning should read.
Since the Federal Government has issued pandemic plans covering the Worse Case Scenario, I would suggest two books are essential reading, to get one up to date on things. First, of course, is John M. Barry's superb "The Great Influenza," covering the 1918 pandemic. The other book is this one. After reading this work, you'll never trust Asian flu reporting again.
As a confirming note, a press account today (5/7/06) reported that half the A/H5N1 cases coming out of Asia were reported in a timely enough manner as to be of value in alerting the planet of a human-to-human pandemic. In that context, Mr. Davis' book should be taken even more seriously.
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| very spooky and very good reading |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
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This book is a comprehensive look at just what bird (or avian) flu is all about, and what the world is, or is not, doing about it.
Influenzas are divided into three major categories. Types B & C are relatively mild, leading to the common cold, or, at worst, the winter flu. But Type A is the unpredictable, and lethal, strain that is fully entrenched among the bird population of East Asia. It is very easy for the disease to jump from migratory birds, to ducks, to chickens, to swans and egrets, and back again, mutating along the way. Until now, the human deaths have come from direct contact with infected birds. But the time is coming when that last mutation will click into place, causing it to jump from person to person. A worldwide flu pandemic, with a death toll in the hundreds of millions, is, as one researcher put it, "late."
What is America doing to prepare for the coming pandemic? Not much. Industrial chicken farms, with millions of chickens crowded into one building, are a wonderful breeding ground for diseases of all sorts, not just bird flu. Remember SARS from a couple of years ago? Among the reasons why it was contained is that the cities where it happened, Toronto and Hong Kong, are modern cities with modern health care systems. Imagine if SARS had shown up somewhere in Africa, with a much less modern health care system.
The major drug companies have opposed moves to allow other countries to make cheap copies of flu vaccines, even though there are nowhere near enough doses of vaccines even for first responders, out of concern for their corporate bottom line. The Bush Administration is more interested in spending money preparing for a smallpox or anthrax outbreak, something which has much less chance of ever happening, than in spending it on bird flu, which is coming in the near future.
This is a very spooky book, which I guess is the idea. It is written for the layman, and does a fine job at showing how unprepared America is for the next flu pandemic. It is very highly recommended.
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| Scientifically learned but accessible and very useful |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
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The free market approach to procuring vaccine when signs of epidemics of Influenza A arise has been disastrous, Davis shows. In the U.S. epidemics in 1957 and 1968, companies could not manufacture enough vaccine in time to prevent it from spreading and killing tens of thousands of elderly people, pregnant women, etc. Vaccines for infectious diseases are very unprofitable for pharmaceutical companies to manufacture. The need for flu vaccine is uncertain and seasonal. And the flu mutates and reasserts into new forms that make a previous season's vaccine obsolete so the companies get left with a worthless stockpile. Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt recently bragged that he had set up a contract with Sanofi Pasteur to procure new production lines for cell-based vaccines. The head of the Centers for Disease Control Julie Gerberding, much disliked amongst her employees for being a political operative of the Bush administration, in contrast, acknowledged that vaccines become obsolete after one season, that the production lines being set up by Sanofi Pasteur were limited and also that the doses puchased were more adequate for common cold/flu. Leavitt, also dodged questions about the relatively tiny purchases compared to those made by other countries, of Tamiflu, the one drug that can inhibit the explosion of Avian flu in the body after it has gotten set up in the body.
Currently the U.S. has two companies under contract to produce flu vaccine. One of them is the San Francisco based Chiron. FDA officials i.e. appointees of the Bush administration, waited nine months before sending the inspector's report to Chiron officials about finding many sources of potential contamination in its production and then assured congress that the company was working on the problem. Then in July 2004, Chiron discovered massive doses of bacteria that can cause death from septic shock, just as it was bragging in a press release that it had shipped one million doses of Fluviron vaccine to the U.S and planned to ship 52 million more doses. Chiron waited a month to tell the FDA. FDA acting head Lester Patterson and company officials assured congress everything was fine but shortly after those assurances, British inspectors closed their planned and withdrew their license to manufacture vaccines.
Devastatingly he notes how the Bush administration has used the scare over anthrax, which seems to have come not from Muslim terrorists or Saddam, but from Fort Detrick Maryland, to ramp up funding for vaccines against the very remote possibility of smallpox or anthrax transmission by terrorists. At the same time Bush has slashed funds for public health protection against infectious diseases like the evolving strains of Avian flu. They are, of course, only following the course set by the Reagan administration. Rates of infectious disease among poorer Americans have increased since the cuts of the Reagan years, weakening immune systems and thus giving diseases like Avian flu and SARS an easier pathway. Neither Democratic nor Republic politicians, both heavily funded by Pharmaceuticals, have been willing to even timidly suggest that the patent rights of the flu vaccine manufacturers should be violated and governments should be able to produce their own generic version of vaccines. Maintaining the level of Pharmaceutical company profits, the most profitable industry in the world is more important than slightly cutting into those profits by allowing governments to produce their own generic version of Tamiflu (a proposal which the U.S. and France blocked at a WHO conference in 2002) to say nothing of producing drugs to combat Malaria and reduce AIDS deaths in Africa (also blocked by the U.S.). . He notes how AIDs must have got started. Fisherman in West Africa could not longer compete in procuring fish for protein and commerce as their governments lifted restrictions on corporate foreign fishing on their shores. Meanwhile, West Africa's previously isolated rain forests were logged over and exposedtheir pathogens to the rest of the world, particularly through their animals which many Africans turned to as a source of protein in lieu of the fish.
Government spending on public health in third world has been dramatically slashed in the third world as governments are compelled to undergo IMF (i.e. U.S.) imposed structural adjustment so government preparedness in these countries for public health disasters is even worse than before. He mentions the Indian government's response to a Pneumonic Plague outbreak in the slums of Suratt, where there is one toilet for every 250 persons. The rapidly expanding slums of the third world are extremely dangerous for spreading disease as are the crowded conditions among sweatshop laborers in China's poultry center, Guangdong province, who suffer from pollution related respiratory disease and cacner.
In the United States and in Thailand and the rest of Asia, mass chicken farms tens of thousands of chickens co-exist with other poultry, wildfowl and human beings and thus Avian flu has the chance to go through many different hosts and evolve. One chicken farm in Utah produces more excrement than the entire city of Los Angeles. In 2000-01, chicken farms in the Tilgore valley in Californian and in British Colombia both covered up the spread of Avian flu among their fowl.
Davis describes how the Thai poultry conglomerate CP, in collusion with the Thai govt., bribed its sources of chickens to keep quiet while its workers at its processing plants were unknowingly exposed as they prepared to export the chicken. The Thai government blamed small scale chicken producers who are very poor backyard producers and went around butchering all their chickens while offering them terms for compensation which they could almost never abide by.. The CP has been blamed for one particular Avian flu outbreak at one of its open air poultry farms in Vietnam. CP apparently sent campaign donations to Clinton through John Huang in the scandal that got right wingers all excited. One insightful thinker at the Weekly Standard tried to tie CP and its close connections with China as a Commie front company that was influencing Clinton. . Of course, Davis points out, CP actually has had strong business relations with Bush Sr. and Neil Bush and the Carlyle group.
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| Eve of Destruction |
| Customer Rating: 3 out of 5 |
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He's kind of into it, isn't he? And that's not even considering the scary picture of the rooster on the front cover of his new book, MONSTER AT THE DOOR. In the 1950s such an illustration might have graced the cover of TALES FROM THE CRYPT, now here it is advertising, or promoting an ostensibly serious document with a little bit of scare quotes going on.
Another reviewer for Amazon praises Mike Davis for his mountains of research. That's all very well, but in the six months since the publication of this book medicine and medical technology has altered dramatically and I find these citations nearly useless for constructing a response to the threat. The sad thing is that at this stage of the game the internet can probably tell you more than a book, with its finite "endgame" of a 2005 publication date. We must know more about avian flu and the men, women, and children who have already come down with this devastating, and supercontagious disease.
Davis names names, calling the governments of Thailand, Indonesia and China "super deceivers" for their attempts to quell debate and to cover up the extent of the illness. It was not merely millions of chickens and porcine family mammals who lay wasted by the AF, it was millions of people, Thais, Chinese, everyone who had anything to do with these infected birds. You could see them gasping for air and raising a withered hand, then the air went out of them and they collapsed into death. Mike Davis doesn't have all the answers, but he's on the trail of the right questions. Most of all, in our global economy, who profits by this death? Who profits from the intentional slowdown of vaccine production? He compares the way poor Africans are suffering from AIDS and views the lack of response on the part of "world public health" as a template for what's going to happen here. If they can ignore the deaths of billions of Africans, what's going to happen when a virus much more easily spread hits the airwaves like some sort of Stephen King like fever dream?
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