Top Menu

Corporate farming and the new flu: Green Left Weekly reviews Rob Wallace’s book

Big Farms Make Big Flu

Big Farms Make Big Flu: Dispatches on Infectious Disease, Agribusiness, and the Nature of Science
400 pp, $24 pbk, ISBN 9781583675892
By Rob Wallace

Reviewed by Pat Brewer

“A new influenza pandemic is quite possible, according to a study by researchers at the University of NSW’s School of Public Health. The study notes that 19 different influenza strains have affected humans in the last 100 years, but the speed with which new strains have emerged has increased over the past 15 years. There have been seven new strains in the past five years alone. ¶ In Big Farms Make Big Flu, published last year by Monthly Review Press, Rob Wallace agreed a pandemic is not just more than likely, it is probable, and echoes the necessity to prepare. But his focus is to identify why the rate of new virus strains has increased, which he sees as basic to how to effectively plan containment….”

Read the review at Green Left Weekly

Comments are closed.