The Unnatural History of Bird Flu – Nautilus

Media coverage of H5N1 captures this urgency but tends to focus on the day-by-day the latest depopulation, as mass exterminations at poultry facilities are known, the latest sick cows or dead cats, the latest mutations. Lost in the furor is a clear sense of where H5N1, and the class of influenzas to which it belongs, comes from: the evolutionary crucible of intensive animal production.

In the facilities the artificial ecosystems that now house much of Earth s terrestrial vertebrate biomass, constraints on virulence that prevail in natural ecosystems are not merely removed. Virulence is actually favored. In the words of Mark Woolhouse, an epidemiologist at the University of Edinburgh, the viruses are a response to the selection pressures that exist in a human creation: the modern poultry farm.

via nautil.us

Brandon Keim.

Yikes.