What happens when the future comes early? When does record-breaking weather segue from unfortunate inconvenience to an inconvenient truth?

Trailer from Al Gore's documentary on climate change

When…

• China reports massive floods affecting 75% of its provinces? The tally of dead and missing now tops 1,000, with the devastation said to affect 110 million people. 645,000 homes have been destroyed. The economic hit is estimated to at $21 billion – and rising. Or…

• Russia has a drought like it hasn’t seen in 130 years? The country’s breadbasket is toast: 20% of the wheat crop is lost at a financial cost that could easily exceed $1 billion.  Meanwhile, lack of air conditioning and love of liquor has led to thousands of “swimming while drunk” deaths. Or…

• Argentina and Uruguay shiver in below freezing temperatures? Hypothermia in the streets of Buenos Aires and snow reported in seaside resort town. Or…

• the Rio Grande actually looks like a big raging river? Some sections along the U.S. / Mexican border have risen 17 feet and more above flood stage, cutting off clean water supplies, affecting tens of thousands of people, destroying thousands of homes and triggering mass evacuations. Or…

• NOAA says 2010 is on track to becoming the hottest year on record? Earth has been on a hot streak for the last 304 months (a little over 25 years), with the average monthly global temperatures exceeding than the average for entire 2oth century. This past June was the hottest on record.

“Warmer than average global temperatures have become the new normal,” says Jay Lawrimore, chief of climate analysis at NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center, which tracks these numbers. “The global temperature has increased more than 1 degree Fahrenheit [0.7 degree C] since 1900 and the rate of warming since the late 1970s has been about three times greater than the century-scale trend.”…

…”Frankly, I was expecting that we’d see large temperature increases later this century with higher greenhouse gas levels and global warming,” Stanford climate scientist Noah Diffenbaugh, who headed up the research, said in a prepared statement. “I did not expect to see anything this large within the next three decades.”

Was last Spring’s  Nashville flood, which took the region by surprise after 13 inches of rain fell in 24 hours, a local catastrophe or part of much larger trend? What about the 8 inch deluge than drowned Milwaukee last week? Or the second tornado ever to hit the Bronx?

WEATHER HAPPENS / CLIMATES CHANGE

If man-made greenhouse gases are behind the deadly weather, that’s good news: We can still do something about it. But as a new study of historic droughts in Asia shows, the ramifications of disturbed weather patterns can be devastating, no matter what the cause.

Scientists at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory spent 15 years collecting samples from more than 300 sites across Asia to create an atlas of tree ring data for monsoon weather patterns. The correlations between major droughts and political unrest are striking, if not completely surprising. From the collapse of the Khmer civilization to the demise of the Ming Dynasty and the French Revolution, nothing topples a government faster than a desperate hungry mob.

Perhaps the worst drought, the scientists found, was the Victorian-era “Great Drought” of 1876-1878. The effects were felt across the tropics; by some estimates, resulting famines killed up to 30 million people. According to the tree-ring evidence, the effects were especially acute in India, but extended as far away as China and present-day Indonesia. Colonial-era policies left regional societies ill-equipped to deal with the drought’s consequences, as historian Mike Davis details in his book Late Victorian Holocausts. Famine and cholera outbreaks at this time in colonial Vietnam fueled a peasant revolt against the French.

The political opposition to the now crippled U.S. Climate Bill should be quaking in their boots. Given the staggering amount of scientific evidence linking human-generated greenhouse gas emissions to global warming and climate change, they will bear the blame for blocking action when it could have made a difference. (According to a new survey published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 97% of scientists say climate change “very likely” has a man-made component.)

A BOUNTY OF BLIGHTS: CAUSE & EFFECT OR COINCIDENCE?

The cruelty of blight is uniquely insidious. Hopes, dreams and futures are destroyed along with crops. A blight is promise snatched away. In a matter of weeks, sometimes days, sometime hours, months of labor is laid to waste and investment is turned to debt.

It doesn’t take much: just a few invisible spores carried by the wind to a host plant. Once a botanical beach-head is established, blights – which thrive in the monocultures of modern agriculture – quickly become “community diseases,” spreading from plant to plant, field to field, region to region, painting once verdant fields black with the brush of death.

The first major victory in the The Green Revolution was genetic lab-tweak that made wheat impervious to a blight called stem rust, while also increasing yields – a rare and remarkable “two-fer” benefit. So significant was this breakthrough, plant biologist Norman Borlaug was award the Nobel Prize for it. The dream of eradicating hunger seemed within reach. Yet a little over a half-century later, the solution – crop protection provided by a single gene – has become part of the problem.

In 1999, a strain of rust was discovered in a wheat field in Uganda that had evolved past the genetic barrier. Dubbed “Ug99,” it has since splintered off into several strains or “races,” some of which are impervious to more recently developed multi-gene defenses. In a little over a decade, stem rust has traveled 5,000 miles and now threatens grain production in Africa and Asia, and indirectly threatens production everywhere else. From the pathogen’s perspective, all wheat has become more or less alike as diversity has been systematically bred away.

Wheat is the primary source of calories for millions of people worldwide, and accounts for around 30 percent of global grain production and 44 percent of cereals used as food. Globally, wheat provides nearly 55 percent of the carbohydrates and 20 percent of the food calories we consume every day.

- Dr. Mahmoud Solh, Director General of the Syria-based International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA).

With so much at stake, an international collaborative effort, spearheaded by the Borlaug Global Rust Initiative, is playing a frantic game of defense, developing resistant strains to deploy strategically as barriers to slow the blight’s spread. But the work requires the cooperation of countries otherwise at odds, such as India and Pakistan. And it takes money: steady, dependable funding and lots of it.

Stem rust isn’t the only globetrotting super-pathogen:

• An especially aggressive strain of brown streak virus is attacking Cassava, a staple for 800 million people in Africa, Asia and South America. In the 6 years since it was first spotted in East Africa, it has spread at pandemic speed. Cassava, a drought-tolerant plant that requires very little tending, is particularly important for regions beset with malaria and HIV/AIDS. Its loss means billions of dollars more needed for basic food aid.

• Late blight, a.k.a. the blight that caused Ireland’s Great Potato Famine, turns out to also have a taste for American tomatoes. Last year, its spores not only rode the wind, but took to the highways, hitching on seedling plants trucked to home improvement stores across the country. In only two years, it appears to have become entrenched.

• Stripe rust, another wheat  plague, was recently discovered to have an alternate host, the common ornamental barberry plant, on which the fungus sexually reproduces. The resulting genetic diversity of the fungus, set against the genetic uniformity of wheat, supplies the resilience that has made it so difficult to stamp out.

A warming world favors pathogens’ survival over winter, while shifting weather patterns can blow them into new territories. Human-mediated transport (trade and travel) clearly play a large role as well.

Whatever the drivers, these colliding trends of record-breaking weather / climate change and emerging plant diseases spell big trouble for global food security. In just the past month, wheat prices spiked 30%, due mostly to the Russian drought. Russia will still have enough for domestic needs, but higher prices are expected to drive up inflation, and there will be that much less for export. Stem rust primarily affects small farmers gowing for local consumption in the developing countries. Higher global commodity prices also translates into higher food aid costs.

According to the scientists at NOAA, the extreme weather of 2010 may very well be the “new normal.” Hotter, colder, wetter, drier. And way beyond inconvenient.

FURTHER READING

• “NOAA: June, April to June, and Year-to-Date Global Temperatures are the Warmest on Record,” NOAA data sheet (2010)

• “Climate Bill, R.I.P.” by Tom Wilkinson, Rolling Stone

• “Rust in the Bread Basket: A crop-killing fungus is spreading out of Africa towards the world’s great wheat-growing areas,” The Economist

• Al Gore’s Amazon books page
  

A round up in September could spell the end for a small herd of wild horses out West. Why that matters more than you think: a tale of bureaucracy and special interests, horse meat and hot flashes, and wrongs that wouldn’t be that hard to right.

Moments before September 11, 2001 turned into “9/11,” my cameraman, Norris, and I were driving into the Pryor mountains along the Wyoming / Montana border to film a short segment for National Geographic on a wild horse round-up. I fiddled with the radio dial, trying to catch a few snippets of early morning NPR before the signal was swallowed by the scenery. Something about a plane hitting a building in NY…details still sketchy. Then static.

We didn’t really think too much about it. It wouldn’t have been the first plane to fly into a building there. New York has a history of bizarre accidents: car-swallowing sink holes, water main geysers, gravity-prone construction cranes. Things are constantly crashing and breaking and exploding and toppling in the Big Apple. That’s news?

Besides, we were traveling in a landscape so vast and ancient, so full of mythic drama, everything else fell away. We settled into our insignificance, staring out the window, trying to figure out how one endless vista managed to segue into the next. Yet in the stillness and eternity of that clear blue morning, we were surrounded by evidence of sudden, violent destruction: massive boulders strewn about like so many pebbles, gullies where water had once raged, trees scarred by lightning, twisted by wind.

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By the time we reached the round up site, one tower had fallen and the second was burning. Like everything else airborne that day, helicopters that were to be used to hunt and herd the horses were immediately grounded and the round-up suspended. I climbed up a hill to try to get a cell signal to call my old editor at BusinessWeek. Amazingly the call went through, though we spoke for just a moment. I would learn later that from the 43rd floor midtown newsroom, they had a clear view of the carnage, but no idea whether colleagues working in the financial district had survived it.

I called family. I called National Geographic. “Stay put for now.”

For the next several days, Norris and I shuttled between a Motel 6, where we stayed up nights watching news on old televisions bolted into the cinder block walls of our rooms, and wandering the mountains by day with Ginger Kathrens, a filmmaker working on a documentary for the PBS show “Nature.” She had been following the horses for some time, using the story of young stallion she had first seen as a newborn foal and named “Cloud” as the centerpiece. Ginger, we quickly learned, was the Jane Goodall of wild horses. I am quite sure we wouldn’t have seen what were able to see without her. She knew all the horses’ haunts. She told us of their nuanced emotional lives, and of the dangers they faced from bears, mountain lions, lightning strikes. bitterly cold winters, parched summers and raging wildfires.

She could think like a wild horse. They trusted her. If we were with Ginger, we must be okay.

Ginger Kathrens has beeni filming the Pryor Mountain (a.k.a. Arrowhead Mountain) horses since 1995, producing a series of three documentaries for PBS "Nature." The latest installment, "Cloud: Challenge of the Stallions," premiers on October 25, 2009.

I sat on the bumper of our mud-splattered SUV, surveying a world with little evidence of humans. No contrails in the sky. No traffic hum. No buildings. No buildings burning. Nobody. Except for Norris – tall, calm, strong, quiet, silver-white curly hair glowing in the sun, making friends with a band of bachelor stallions. One by one, they came up to him and sniffed, then sniffed his camera. We ended up with quite the muzzle/nuzzle reel that trip.

WAR ON THE RANGE: HORSE ON THE HOOF VERSUS HORSE A LA CARTE

Horses have always been the go-to symbol for the Wild West, embodying all we like to say makes this country special, made it great: strength, courage, independence, maverick (before “mavericky”), free. Yet for years, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), which controls vast stretches of public lands, has been circling like a patient predator, shrinking the area where horses can roam by millions of square acres, while painting them as feral invaders whose thirst and sharp hooves destroy grasslands, threatening the prosperity of cattle ranchers. Nevermind that the national cattle herd is almost 100 million strong, while the mustang population has dwindled from 2 million to fewer than 30,000 in the wild. Or that only about 2 million cattle actually use the range, or  that grazing leases are often scandalously cheap. The pressure is on as the endgame takes shape:

• Five years ago, the Burns bill, a rider slipped into a massive 3,300 page federal appropriations bill just before the Congress adjourned for Thanksgiving break, made it easier to sell horse meat for consumption abroad.

• A few months ago, the state of Montana passed legislation to encourage horse slaughterhouses to set up shop in the state (although legal challenges are expected to discourage would-be investors).

• In September, the BLM plans to remove 70 horses from the Pryor Mountain herd, which will take it below a genetically viable population.  Eight years ago, when Norris and I filmed, the round up goal was to reduce the herd to about 200. Now it’s 120.

Could a  few thousand horses really be that be that much of a bother to a handful of cattle ranchers? Is there a horse meat special interest lobby working in the shadows? Does the BLM really have a “Secret Plan To Destroy Wild Horses”?

Horse a-la-carte may indeed be worth more than horse-on-the-hoof. – as a staggeringly gruesome story out of Miami suggests. Seventeen horses in the area have recently been found butchered. No one knows who the killers are, but speculation is rife that an underground horse meat trade commanding prices as high as $40 per pound is behind the crime spree. The legal trade is also bigger than you might think, with ardent gourmands from Canada to France to Japan, where horse sashimi is a delicacy.

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Back on the mountain top with the Pryor herd, such culinary preferences seem barbaric to the point of cannibalism. There is no question that these animals have intelligence, emotional sophistication, stories, memories and, in their own horse way, culture. They form family bands, which are fiercely defended. There is play and joy and love. There is sorrow and heartbreak.

Prehistoric horse painting from the Lascaux cave in France.

In the five centuries since their ancestors galloped off from the Spanish conquistadors who brought them by ship  to the Americas, the Pryor horses have, in their alpine isolation, reverted back to a more primitive form. They have grown smaller overall, with many sporting zebra stripes on their legs and stripes along their backs as well. They are Lascaux horses come to life.

Prehistoric humans, of course, hunted and ate horse, but it was a survival-of-the-fittest battle of wits and cunning. In September, the Pryor horses will be rounded up by a small fleet of helicopters. They will be forced to run for miles over rough terrain, unable to fight or escape the relentless threatening din overhead. Finally, exhausted, they will be led into a coral by a “Judas” horse trained for the task. It will be a scene of hot, sweaty, dusty desperation as the horses are sorted and family bands torn apart. The air will be filled with the frantic cries of stallions separated from their mares.

Some horses will be allowed to return to the range. Some will be auctioned off. Some will end up in “temporary” holding pens where they could spend years in crowded misery. There are now 30,000 horses warehoused in conditions that defy even the loosest definition of humane.

Enter Madeleine Pickens, wife of billionaire T. Boone, who has a plan to adopt – and sterilize – the entire lot. This isn’t the first such attempt to return captured horses to the range, but it is, by far, the most ambitious. Whether it succeeds depends on whether bureaucrats can be coaxed to think beyond their usual boxes.

HOT FLASH(es), PREMARIN, “BYPRODUCT” FOALS & SLAUGHTERHOUSES

If not, it is hard to imagine that these horses won’t eventually end up at a slaughterhouse. Already, an estimated 100,000 horses are butchered each year, mostly at facilities in Mexico and Canada, according to a Humane Society of the United States info sheet.

Horses of virtually all ages and breeds are slaughtered, from draft types to miniatures. Horses commonly slaughtered include unsuccessful race horses, horses who are lame or ill, surplus riding school and camp horses, mares whose foals are not economically valuable, and foals who are “byproducts” of the Pregnant Mare Urine (PMU) industry, which produces the estrogen-replacement drug Premarin®. Ponies, mules, and donkeys are slaughtered as well.

The deeper you look, the uglier it gets. Premarin, a profitable menopause drug marketed by pharmaceutical giant Wyeth, requires estrogen harvested from the urine of pregnant mares. Mares remain tethered in their stalls for their entire 11 month pregnancies, while their offspring are born to die, sold for meat. So important is hormone replacement therapy (HRT) to the  company’s bottom line, Wyeth is currently embroiled in a scandal, alleged to have paid ghostwriters to play up HRT’s benefits in articles published by medical journals. This despite  a major clinical study in 2002 that concluded that HRT presents far more risks than benefits to women.

Surely, there must be a better biotech answer for hot flashes.

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Horses sold for slaughter are often crammed into trucks designed for smaller animals, and neither fed nor watered adequately.

A couple of years ago, not far from where I live just north of Chicago, a semi packed with 59 horses overturned on a highway at night. The driver told police he was making a delivery from an auction in Indiana to a breeder in Minnesota, though many suspected the horses were ultimately destined for slaughter. Nineteen horses died from the accident. Another required extensive surgery. The owner was eventually fined $4,000 and senteced to supervision.

If indeed we are what we eat, bon appetit…

ANCIENT HORSES & A RETURN OF THE NATIVE

Watching the horses in the Pryors on that saddest of September days felt like looking back in time to a better time. Horses – equines -  evolved in North America over tens of millions of years. There were dozens of species of every size and shape, adapted to all kinds of niches, surviving countless shifts in climate. But between 10,000 and 12,000 years ago they disappeared, wiped out along with an ark full of megafauna that included mammoths and camels (yes, camels).

Nevertheless, the equine family survived. Over their long history, some had trotted into Asia via the Bering land bridge, and from there branched into new species settling in Siberia, Europe, the Middle East and Africa. It wasn’t until Columbus headed West in search of the Far East just over 500 years ago that horses once again were seen in their old home, the New World.

So are they feral invaders? Or is the story of the American horse more a “return of the native”?

It seems hard to believe that stone age hunters, even those armed with the sharpest of Clovis points, could have taken out a species so exquisitely refined by evolution to outrun a raft of tooth & claw predators and tough enough to survive in the most edgy of environments. The only way Norris and I managed to find the Pryor horses was with an SUV, a rough semblance of a road and an experienced guide. They were tucked away in mountain passes where only helicopters could ferret them out.

But perhaps the Pleistocene herds were weakened in some way. Maybe they faced a “perfect storm”: increased hunting pressure, the emergence of new diseases affecting both fertility and mortality, and the floods, fires and famines that came with an ice age giving way to a warmer planet.

HOME, HEARTBREAK & HOPE

Norris and I eventually drove home, absconding with our rented SUV for the cross-country journey while the airlines struggled to resume service. We knew, though, that as soon we left the Pryors, we would lose the protection of our unexpected Shangri-La. The grim reality of our world and time would be inescapable. As we headed east across the Minnesota border, NPR’s signal was finally strong enough to give the Rush Limbaugh station some competition. Miles flew by. Our hearts grew heavier.

The World Trade Center was just a smoking hole by the time I got to New York. Flyers with the faces of the missing were stapled to wooden walkways across the street from Ground Zero. I joined a silent procession walking past dazed and aching.

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photo: Ginger Kathrens

In the years since, I have often thought about that week with the wild horses. Graced with grit, smarts and luck, they had managed to carve out something enduring. Whether the mountain ecosystem welcomed them or welcomed them back, they were now a seamless part of it. Their grazing shapes the grasslands. And as prey and carrion, they feed bears, mountain lions, vultures and eagles.

I often cover stories where hope is in short supply: Ice sheets melt. People starve. Women are raped. Pandemics threaten. Drugs are faked. Water is polluted. Fields are parched. People enslaved. Forests disappear. With so much so wrong, how can things possibly turn out well? Where do we even begin to make a dent? The reflex is to prioritize for triage, to figure out whether to go after open wounds or underlying causes. But it is all urgent.

So where do a few dozen, or a few hundred, or even a few thousand wild horses fit into the scheme of things? This is one of those rare instances when doing nothing (the Pryor round up), or doing something fairly easy (hashing out the Pickens’ proposal), or simply putting a stop to something (Premarin) could make a significant difference.

Doing right by horses is simply the right thing to do.

There is also a powerful symbolism. As the years go by, the rituals of 9/11 remembrance have begun to feel staged. We remember the date, not the day. The Twin Towers have faded into abstraction.

But the wild horses still endure in triumphant defiance. They are a legacy from our nation’s past and from an even deeper past. Their existence provides a gift of perspective, without which it will be that much harder to find our way.

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ADDENDUM

September 12, 2009

Despite protests that included tens of thousands of emails, calls and faxes to BLM administrators, the pleas and prayers of a Crow elder, a last minute legal challenge and swell of too-late national news coverage, the round up of the Pryor Mountain wild horses went forward as planned last week.

It was everything feared and then some – as chronicled by filmmaker Ginger Kathrens’ daily blog posts. Observers weren’t always allowed to observe. The BLM waffled on its decision that captured horses would be available only for adoption (requires some vetting), opting to put some up for straight sale (no vetting). Since older horses are harder to train and thus less adoptable, they could languish in government holding pens for years or, potentially, end up in a slaughterhouse.

The youngest horses – even those returned to the wild – also face an uncertain future. Kathrens filmed a foal so lame, she could barely walk after being helicopter-herded for miles down rugged terrain, galloping from an alpine paradise at 8,000′ to a dusty desert corral at 3,000′.

Beyond the disturbing question of why our government is spending any time or money on such folly lies a question perhaps even more disturbing: Why there are so many foals on the mountain this late in the year? Foals are supposed to be born in spring so they can fatten up on summer’s sweet grasses to grow strong enough to survive Montana’s long harsh winters. Horses born too late in the sesason are at a severe disadvantage – as are their nursing mothers. Weakened by cold and dwindling forage, they are more vulnerable to disease and make easy marks for predators.

So what’s going on? What’s mucking with the equine reproductive clock? Something called Porcine Zona Pellucida or PZP, an “immunocontroceptive” designed to keep mares from conceiving. The vaccine triggers an immune response that alters the shape of sperm receptors on the surface of egg cells so sperm can’t get in.

Only, apparently, a few do…

Stallions will simply keep trying to get mares pregnant, even outside the normal mating season. Eventually, as the vaccine’s effects begin to wear off, they succeed.

Ironically, the young foal wobbling around in agony was a member of a band brought in to give mares shots of PZP.

FOLLOW UP: BACK ON THE MOUNTAIN

Ginger Kathrens reports on the horses set free:

* ROAM – Restore Our American Mustangs

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MORE READING/VIEWING

“Cloud: Challenge of the Stallions,” Ginger Kathrens’ third documentary for Nature (PBS) premiers on October 25, 2009 (preview)

“Cloud’s Legacy: The Stallion Returns” by Ginger Kathrens (book)

The Cloud Foundation: a not-profit started by Ginger Kathrens that focuses on wild horse issues

“Saving the American Wild Horse”: companion website for documentary by James Kleinert, featuring Viggo Mortensen & Sheryl Crow among other horse historians and experts; narrated by Peter Coyote:

The American Wild Horse Preservation Campaign

The Mystery of the Ancient Horses: an article speculating what may have happened to America’s Pleistocene Horses by J.A. Ginsburg

The Black Hills Wild Horse Sanctuary: author Dayton O. Hyde’s horse refuge in South Dakota

Help Save America’s Wild Horses: Madeleine Perkins’ website

Map of swine flu outbreak - with time animation bar (BBC)

• In the U.K., experts predict there could be as many as a 100,000 cases per day by August – which would also dash hopes for an economic recovery any time soon, according to a new study.

• In Argentina, flat-footed bureaucrats are in the cross-hairs for taking too long to implement protective measures. Now Argentine pigs are sick, too.

• In Saudi Arabia, where nary a pig dares wander, officials are bracing for millions of devout Muslims planning hajj trips this November, advising the old, young, pregnant and those with chronic conditions to reschedule.

• In the U.S., a new survey suggests that obesity doubles the risk for serious flu complications. Exactly why this is so is a bit of mystery, but a mouse study may provide a clue. Fat mice produce elevated amounts of leptin, a hormone involved in immune response. Researchers theorize that the mice became desensitized to leptin, so their immune systems don’t kick into gear fast enough. When their immune systems finally do kick in, they go into overdrive with a “cytokine storm” – a defense so strong, it kills the host.

At the other end of the spectrum in the developing word are the nearly one billion chronically hungry weakened by malnutrition. Now factor in air pollution, which has long been known to exacerbate respiratory illnesses in general, and it is really not too much of stretch to say that almost everyone suffers from some kind of complicating underlying condition. To put it in medical terms, co-morbidities are probably the rule, not the exception.

Still, there is something particularly unfair and frightening about the risk to pregnant women. Though case numbers are small, a disturbing trend has begun to emerge of otherwise healthy women fighting for their lives and the lives of their unborn babies only days after coming down with swine flu.

ABC "Nightline" segment opens with the story of Audrey Opdyke, 26 weeks pregnant, who came down with swine flu. She was put in an induced coma to try to save the baby. Shortly after this piece aired, an emergency C-section was performed. The baby did not surive.

The CDC’s page on “Pregnant Women and Novel Influenza A (H1N1) Virus: Considerations for Clinicians” does not discuss etiology, but it might be similar to the obesity story — although instead of leptin desensitizing the immune system, pregnancy itself might act as a dampener (to prevent rejection of the fetus). By the time the mother’s body mounts a defense, it is too much, too late.

Influenza presents another, more subtle, threat to the unborn: Exposure to the virus in the first trimester appears to increase the (still small) risk the child will develop schizophrenia later in life. Again, the “how” remains murky, but if it is due to the mother’s immune response rather than direct exposure to the virus, then a vaccine, which also triggers an immune response, could be dangerous.

As swine flu begins to spread into the developing where maternal health care is already spotty, the effects of this pandemic could prove especially heartbreaking.

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PIGS, PATHOGENS & OPPORTUNITY

Now a second strain of a combo pig/human/avian influenza virus has been identified in Saskatchewan, Canada. So far it causes only mild illness and spreads pig-to-pig and  pig-to-person. Whether it can spread person-to-person is still unknown; the illness may be so mild that patients aren’t tested. But it shows that such viral mixing is likely much more common than previously thought, and that large hog factory farms with their high density populations provide a perfect setting.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the world in the Philippines, pigs have been identified as a host of Reston ebolavirus, the only strain that isn’t fatal to humans. The discovery, via metagenomics, came as a surprise. (listen to Science magazine podcast with APHIS-USDA researcher Michael McIntosh). The pigs were also suffering from  porcine reproductive and respiratory disease syndrome, the severity of which may have been the result of co-infection. USDA researchers are concerned, of course, about food production and safety implications. The WHO is worried about the ease of pig to human transmission. In January, several hog farm workers, along with a butcher, tested positive for REV antibodies. Should the strain mutate into a more virulent or even lethal version, all bets are off on stopping the carnage.

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Eventually, the fog of the current battle against swine flu (a.k.a. “Pandemic H1N1 2009 “) will lift. One can only hope that then policy-makers will  – finally – begin to shift focus to the biggest “underlying condition” of all: a modern farming system rife with significant public health dangers. Otherwise, almost inevitably, they will find themselves in a few years once again calling for emergency conferences, fretting over limited budgets, drawing up distribution plans for vaccines and resistance-prone anti-virals and fighting a variation of the very same war.

Perhaps Peter Cooke put it best in the cult classic “Frog & Peach” routine he performed with Dudley Moore about a catastrophic failure of a restaurant located in the middle of the Yorkshire Moors. When asked whether he had learned from his mistakes, Cook’s proud proprietor replies, “Yes! I have learned from my mistakes! And I am sure I could repeat them exactly!”

Well, exactly…

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FURTHER READING

When Pigs Flu: Swine-flu outbreak could be linked to Smithfield factory farms (Tom Philpott/Grist)

Follow the Pigs! – Swine Flu, Factory Farms, Mapping and Public Health (TrackerBlog)

A Virus by Any Other Name: Lessons from an Outbreak (so far…) (TrackerBlog)

Fresh (movie trailers – pay particular attention to segment on pig farmer Russ Kremer’s life-changing bout with farm-incubated MRSA)

Food, Inc (movie website / trailer)

Polyface Farm’s Joel Salatin interview (Venture / Bloomberg TV)

"Current WHO phase of pandemic alert"

Last week, the World Health Organization ratcheted up its pandemic rating for swine flu (aka H1N1) all the way to an unprecedented “pandemic imminent” level 5, with a top-of-the-chart 6 considered inevitable. Was it time to wear masks? Stock up on Tamiflu and canned goods? Update wills? Pull out old high school lit-class copies of The Decameron?

Well, no. At least not yet. Plenty of people got sick, but is was mostly run-of-the-mill seasonal flu-style misery. Fevers, aches, pains, head-aches, gastrointestinal woes. In the jargon of the public health set: “mild.”  Yet swine flu remains an imminent pandemic and will likely be once all the cases are tallied up.

What’s wrong with this scale?

Quite a few things, it turns out. But the biggest complaint from doctors (including my neighbor, a hospital administrator at a major medical center in Chicago) has been its emphasis on viral spread rather than  severity of illness.

If hospital staffers weren’t sure how deeply furrowed their brows should be, how could anyone expect the media to strike the right tone, or the general public to have a clue? A system intended to inject a sense of thoughtful rationality into the management of global public health emergencies has ended up confusing and frightening more the clarifying. Now that the immediate danger appears past, there is almost of a sense of “Whoops! Nevermind…”  The CDC is already voicing concern over public complacency, worried people will shrug off warnings the next time. Who’s fault is that? (literally…)

A possible easy fix:

• Add a new level 6 that factors in virulence along with human-to-human transmission, and bump the current level 6 to a 7.

PANDEMICS: FIGHTING THE LAST WAR, PREPARING FOR THE NEXT

The scale’s other issues are more subtle. According to the official “WHO phase of pandemic alert” webpage, “pandemic” means “influenza pandemic.” It is as if the SARS scare never happened. In fact, by the WHO’s definition, HIV/AIDS wouldn’t make the cut as a pandemic, despite all evidence to the contrary.

Instead of promoting an approach to biosurveillance designed to track both known and novel pathogens, the WHO’s scale seems oddly specific and limited.

It is even odder considering research the WHO itself has supported to develop cheap rapid diagnostic tests that actually can test for novel pathogens. By a back-of-envelope estimate, 99% of vertebrate viruses have yet to be identified (50,000 vertebrate species, assuming 20 viruses each = 1 million). Since most diseases are zoonotic (meaning they affect multiple species, including humans), such tests are critically important.

Epidemiologist Ian Lipkin, who heads up the Center for Infection and Immunity at the Mailman School of Public Health of Columbia University, which as been working with the WHO,  gave a quick overview to three such tests in a recent Pop!Tech lecture: Mass Tag PCR, GreeneChips and High Through-put Sequencing. Each is able to test for dozens of pathogens simultaneously and narrow down candidates. Even if a pathogen hasn’t been seen before, Lipkin’s team can identify its family – what viruses, bacteria or fungi it is related to and how closely – in a matter of hours.

Epidemiologist Ian Lipkin explains cutting edge diagnostics: "We have the tools to address the risks of pandemics. The implementation difficulties are political and logistical."

SCIENCE FACT / SCIENCE FICTION

What could be worse than pandemic influenza? How about pandemic rabies?  No one is saying the threat is imminent, but the recent emergence of a new strain of the virus in Arizona spreading animal-to-animal through casual contact has researchers more than a little concerned.

Rabies attacks the central nervous system, causing victims to become aggressive, crazy and likely to bite, which is how the virus typically transmits. Fortunatelely, unlike flu where a vaccine must be given prior to infection, a rabies vaccine can be given post-infection. That’s where the good news ends.

The new strain, which mutated from a bat strain, spreads like flu – no bite required – vastly increasing transmission efficiency, especially among social animals such as foxes and raccoons. It has also been seen in skunks. Whether the mutated virus can jump to humans is anybody’s guess, but the fact that it has been observed in foxes means coyotes and dogs are probably at risk. And since foxes, raccoons and skunks have adapted with gusto to the suburban/urban life good life, the opportunity is certainly there.

A wildlife vaccination campaign using an edible vaccine might help contain the spread, but funding is scarce. Howeer, based on limited research, it is clear that the problem has been brewing for a few years, so instead of one small viral fire to put out, there are likely several smoldering across an increasingly large geographic area.

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Contagious, fatal madness. An animal disease spread to humans. Civilization ripped to shreds. Shrieks! Screams! Blood! Gore! Wait a minute…haven’t we seen this movie?