The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu - Hardcover

Davis, Mike

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1595580115 ISBN 13: 9781595580115

Publisher: New Press, The, 2005

Synopsis

From the acclaimed writer The Nation calls the "master of disaster prose," a terrifying forecast of a new global threat.

"We are talking at least seven million deaths, but maybe more—10 million, 20 million, and the worst case, 100 million."—Shigeru Omi, Regional Director, western pacific office of the World Health Organization, November 2004

Avian influenza is a viral asteroid on a collision course with humanity. In 1918, a pandemic strain of influenza killed at least 40 million people in three months. Now, leading researchers believe, another world catastrophe is imminent.

A virus of astonishing lethality, known as H5N1, has become entrenched in the poultry and wild bird populations of East Asia. It kills two out of every three people it infects. The World Health Organization warns that it is on the verge of mutating into a super-contagious pandemic form that could visit several billion homes within two years.

In this urgent and extraordinarily frightening book, Mike Davis reconstructs the scientific and political history of a viral apocalypse in the making, exposing the central roles of agribusiness and the fast-food industries, abetted by corrupt governments, in creating the ecological conditions for the emergence of this new plague. He also details the scandalous failure of the Bush administration, obsessed with hypothetical "bio-terrorism," to safeguard Americans from the greatest biological threat since HIV/AIDS.

About this title

Book Description

The virus known as H5N1 is now endemic among poultry and wild bird populations in East Asia. A flu strain of astonishing lethality, it has a talent for transforming itself to foil the human immune system—and kills two out of every three people it infects. The World Health Organization now warns that avian flu is on the verge of mutating info a super-contagious form that could travel at pandemic velocity, killing up to 100 million people in two years.

In The Monster at Our Door, the first book to sound this alarm, our foremost urban and environmental critic reconstructs the scientific and political history of this viral apocalypse in the making, exposing the central roles played by burgeoning slums, the agribusiness and fast-food industries, and corrupt governments. Mike Davis tracks the avian flu crisis as the virus moves west and the world remains woefully unprepared to contain it. With drug companies unwilling to invest inessential vaccines, severe shortages persist, a scenario Davis compares to the sinking Titanic: there are virtually no lifesaving resources available to the poor, and precious few for the rich, too.

About the Author

MacArthur fellow Mike Davis is the author of several books, including City of Quartz, Ecology of Fear, Late Victorian Holocausts, Dead Cities, and—with Kelly Mayhew and Jim Miller—Under the Perfect Sun. He lives in San Diego.

About this edition

• Publisher: New Press, The
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 1595580115
• ISBN 13: 9781595580115
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 212