An interview with biologist and author Rob Wallace
2017 2017-05Read it in the scan (PDF at ETOL), page 6 →
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enza time, anyway, that’s in eons.
That is now also happening within industrial hog and poultry, and [scientists] have been able to track the shift and see this kind of reassortment going on. Typically, as in all organisms, you might have a mu tation, a point mutation, within the genetic code at a single nucleotide position that changes the virus. And that still happens, but this reassortment, this trading of whole segments, is an accelerant through evolution that allows the virus to arrive upon entirely new ad aptations in ways that point mutation alone wouldn’t allow them. Or, in any short order anyway. … In the last 30 years, there’s been a clear acceleration in the evolution of the virus through this reassort ment, and there’s a growing understanding among scientists that in all likelihood it’s being driven by the industrialization of poultry and hog, which are now traded from one side of the planet to the other, mixing previously isolated strains.
BS: I was an eviscerator at a hog plant. Does this ac count for the fact that workers would get recurrent flus, especially those that work inside the animals? We thought maybe you’d be immune to it the next year, but no such luck—you get it again and again.
RW: There was a paper I cite in the book in which researchers describe the shifts in the hog industry through the 1990s and its effects on influenza. Be fore World War II, but especially afterward, you had a Livestock Revolution here in the United States in the poultry sector. You have all the consolidation across the companies and all the big companies—Tyson and others—began to take over production all the way from breeding to distribution. So you reduce the va riety of birds, the number of farms declines, and the number of heads per farm increases.
The hog sector followed in poultry’s footsteps, and that had a profound effect on everybody associated— not just companies, not just the hog, but the workers involved as well—and the farmers. It is an integrated epidemiology where what happens to the industry af fects how the hogs are exposed to the viruses, which affects the workers who are handling them.
Some of the work that I quote in the book describes