Avian influenza is a viral asteroid on a collision course with humanity.
In 1918 a pandemic strain of influenza killed at least 40 million people
in three months. Now, leading researchers believe, another world
catastrophe is imminent. A virus of astonishing lethality, known as
H5N1, has become entrenched in the poultry and wild bird populations of
East Asia. It kills two out of three people it infects. The World Health
Organisation warns that it is on the verge of mutating into a
super-contagious pandemic form that could visit several billion homes
within two years. In this urgent and extraordinarily frightening book,
Mike Davis reconstructs the scientific and political history of a viral
apocalypse-in-the-making, exposing the central roles of agribusiness and
the fast-food industries, abetted by corrupt governments, in creating
the ecological conditions for the emergence of this new plague. He also
details the scandalous failure of the Bush administration, obsessed with
hypothetical bio-terrorism, to safeguard Americans from the greatest
biological threat since HIV/AIDS. sacrificed the poor in Africa and
South Asia, for whom, in the almost certain event of a pandemic, there
will be no anti-virals or vaccines.
