And just what is WHO?…
Aeon, online platform offering essays, ideas, and video, recently published an article by science writer Laura Spinney, which reminds us that “humans shape their own disease ecology,” and that the World Health Organization needs to “address the real causes of epidemics,” and name them correctly.
“…In his book Big Farms Make Big Flu, the evolutionary ecologist Rob Wallace draws a direct link between the growing threat of zoonotic diseases, and the agricultural practices that neoliberalism has encouraged—notably, the expansion and consolidation of agribusinesses, and the vertical integration of different stages of food production. The food we eat is produced by an ever-shrinking number of ever-growing mass-production units, in which vast herds or flocks of hybrid animals are packed into megabarns, forced to mature in a matter of months, and then slaughtered, processed and transported around the world…. It would be hard to imagine a more perfect incubator for zoonoses, Wallace argues, and among the serious human diseases that he traces back to this food-production model are Nipah virus, Q fever, hepatitis E and deadly new forms of bird flu….”
Read the article in Aeon
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