the guy by the door …

Swine flu masked train passengers in Mexico City -April 2009 {Photo: Wikimedia Foundation}

Biologist Robert G. Wallace appeared on Democracy Now! with an analysis of the origin of the “swine flu” based on a

…cutting-edge formalism based on the asymptotic limit theorems of information theory to describe how punctuated shifts in mesoscale ecosystems can entrain patterns of gene expression and organismal evolution.

that he presents in his forthcoming Springer¹ published book, “Farming Human Pathogens Ecological Resilience and Evolutionary Process”.

Robert G., one of three Wallaces who authored the book. thinks that “swine flu” is a misleading monacher.

…pigs have very little to do with how influenza emerges. They didn’t organize themselves into cities of thousands of immuno-compromised pigs. They didn’t artificially select out the genetic variation that could have helped reduce the transmission rates at which the most virulent influenza strains spread. They weren’t organized into livestock ghettos alongside thousands of industrial poultry. They don’t ship themselves thousands of miles by truck, train or air. Pigs do not naturally fly.

The onus must be placed on the decisions we humans made to organize them this way. And when we say ‘we’, let’s be clear, we’re talking how agribusinesses have organized pigs and poultry.

This quote is from his blog, Farming Pathogens: Disease in a world of our own making. He argues that factory farming, in this case of pigs and poultry, was spread first to East Asia and later to Mexico, by the structural adjustment requirements of loans made by the International Monetary Fund. Wallace calls this the “Nafta Flu” because NAFTA is the local instance structural adjustment that brought us this particular flu which broke out in Mexico. NAFTA was mostly the work of the George H.W. Bush whitehouse, but the Clinton whitehouse signed it.

¹For those on the humanities side of the Two Cultures problem, Springer, formerly Springer-Verlag, has long been one of the leading publishers of establishment science. The Late Larry, who tries to borrow legitimacy for economics from real sciences, will have a hard time dismissing something published by Springer.