Chicken Monster or Chicken Little?

摘要

This is a scary time to be a chicken. Free-range lives on traditional backyard poultry farms have quickly been replaced by large-scale confinement in a crowded, ghetto-like environment. Feeding operations in such compressed living conditions stress the chickens' immune systems and make them susceptible to infectious diseases. An outbreak of highly pathogenic avian influenza in a poultry farm is the harbinger of more than a few fowl deaths—agricultural authorities will cull entire flocks of chickens within a 2-kilometer radius of where a sick or dead bird is found. With severe outbreaks of H5N1 avian influenza in aquatic birds from Asia to Eastern Europe—and tentative leaps into other species—it is a scary time to be a human as well. Just how scary is the alarming message Mike Davis seeks to convey in his short new book, The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu. He argues that a biomedical pandemic akin to the 1918 influenza virus beckons, driven by the greed of multinational corporations, poverty, corrupt governments, and raw political ambition.