Histomat: Adventures in Historical Materialism

'Historical materialism is the theory of the proletarian revolution.' Georg Lukács

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Mike Davis on swine flu

...and why 'the corporate industrialisation of livestock production' is to blame for it:

Animal husbandry in recent decades has been transformed into something that more closely resembles the petrochemical industry than the happy family farm depicted in school readers. In 1965, for instance, there were 53m US hogs on more than 1m farms; today, 65m hogs are concentrated in 65,000 facilities. This has been a transition from old-fashioned pig pens to vast excremental hells, containing tens of thousands of animals with weakened immune systems suffocating in heat and manure while exchanging pathogens at blinding velocity with their fellow inmates.

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1 Comments:

At 8:25 am, Anonymous Anonymous said...

I wonder what part laboratories have in the creation of new viruses, this is a combination of human flu, bird flu and swine flu. We have been told there just happens to be an antidote which is "possibly" effective, which was developed during the last bird flu scare, this must have been tested on a range of constructed illnesses. Thousands of people still die of malaria for the want of a simple net , what are we doing creating viruses?

 

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