Blackbird numbers in the U.K. have fallen by forty percent since 2018, victims of the mosquito-borne Usutu virus, identified in South Africa in 1959 and found in the U.K. since 2020. It can pass to humans but with no known serious or long-term effects. It is being monitored to track how other insect-borne viruses might spread. Of immediate concern is West Nile virus, again with birds as its host, but this time with serious short-term symptoms and the rare death, and against which there is no vaccine. (New Scientist, March 15, 2025)
With fewer blackbirds, other bugs will not get eaten and so multiply. China’s ‘Four Pests’ campaign killed millions of sparrows from 1958 to 1962, resulting in locust plagues which devastated grain crops.
COVID-19 continues to be mis-reported as a ‘one-in-a-hundred-year’ event, although the phrase is an index of intensity, not frequency. Humankind could endure a pandemic of equal clout every other year.
One way to connect timing with impact is to picture our being a third of the way into a 100-year-long run of pandemics, as the late Mike Davis set out in The Monster at our Door (2006), updated for COVID-19 as The Monster Enters .(2020).
Davis gave four economic sources for what he saw as ‘the Plagues of Capitalism’:
- Sprawling third-world slums and Shanghai-style towers act as incubators, as he examined in his 2006 Planet of Slums.
- Jet travel spreads infection before a carrier shows symptoms.
- Industrial-scale agribusiness, tracked by Rob Wallace in Big Farms Make Big Flu (2016) shows how competition between oligopolizers drives down unit prices, thereby depressing their rate of profit. To maintain its magnitude, they expand the mass production of life-stock, bees, palm-oil and fish.
FOOD Inc (2008) includes a sequence showing U.S. abattoirs with cattle up to their fetlocks in shit. Carcasses are run through chemical vats in the hope of killing off any bugs that had made their ways into the beasts, enough to make anyone a vegetarian to avoid the residues.
Bees are shipped across continents in semi-trailers, spreading the Deformed Wing Virus (DWV), transmitted by the Varroa mite, as depicted in the Swiss documentary More than honey (2012). Commercial apiarists in the U.S. of A. report the loss of up to 60 percent of their colonies in the last northern winter.
Ebola crossed to humans after the clear-felling of jungle for palm-oil plantations in West Africa brought a boy into contact with a bat.
Salmon farms at Trumpeter Bay in Tasmania over-stock their 240-meter pens. Overflows from aquaculture in British Columbia are infecting wild salmon. To feed the penned fish and fowl, the Thai corporates are despoiling the planet’s bank of seagrass meadow, Saya de Malha, east of the Seychelles.
Pigs and poultry are bred to reach table weights in double-quick time. Genetic modifications of live-stock eliminate variations and thus accelerates the spread of infection. Pumping them full of anti-biotics reduces the drugs’ effectiveness for us as their consumers. (Monthly Review, v. 71, no. 2, 2019)
In the U.S. of A. alone, 168 million chickens have been put down to control the spread of avian flu, leaving the total flocks down by thirty million from 315 million while egg prices have doubled to $US4 a dozen, without help from a tariff.
To repose the chicken-and-egg problem: to slaughter hundreds of millions of hens means fewer eggs, fewer chicks, fewer chooks, fewer eggs. So it goes.
H5N1 is a sub-type of avian flu virus with a sixty percent mortality from human-to-human contact. It has reached Antarctica south of the Argentine where dense colonies of penguins are wide open to an infection.
In Sentinel Chickens What Birds Tell Us About Our Health and the World (2012), Nobel Laureate Peter Doherty reports an immunologist’s being puzzled at a cage of chickens on a Californian golf course. Any virologist, Doherty muses, would have known they were there to monitor the spread of West Nile virus.
Narrowness masquerading as expertise has not been helped by a predisposition to genetic determinism, mitigated somewhat since the mid-1990s by an acceptance of epi-genetics.
If the life sciences are over-specialised, how much more immune are many of its practitioners to the political and economic sources for disease?
Thirty years ago in Dominion, the palaeontologist at New York’s Museum of Natural History Niles Eldridge, explained that by
[t]aking control over production of our own food supply, we became the first species in the 3.5-billion-year history of life to live outside the confines of the local ecosystem … in stepping away from them and in substituting cultural devices for physiological and anatomical adaptations, we have unwittingly changed the rules of the evolutionary game.
For a start, isolation is no longer as significant in speciation it was for Darwin’s finches.
Those outcomes have inflated our sense of importance, not only over other creatures but against the power of the sun, and from earthquakes and volcanoes. Frederick Engels sounded a tocsin in 1876:
Thus at every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature – but that we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly.
Being able to do either has never guaranteed that we have, and is no guarantee that we shall do so in face of the concatenation of socio-economic and physiological challenges limned above.
Pestilence is one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The Pandemic of 1917-became known as the Spanish Flu because the King of Spain was among of its first victims, although it originated in a Kansas military camp from a nearby pig farm, to be carried to Europe by the troops before killing at least twelve millions, including 13,000 Australians.
The U.S. Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) suspects that other warfare states are developing viruses to be delivered by mosquitoes as the most miniaturized of combat drones. To protect us against other nations’ bio-terrorists, DARPA is breeding its own.
Late in 2023, a cancer-research center in Seattle engineered a virus which spread to a mouse.With mosquitos as the carrier, a research team in Adelaide cut a mice plaque by 70 percent within two generations.
Dangerous levels of anthropogenic global warming allow mosquitoes to breed for longer and in new regions, to spread malaria beyond the tropics.
While Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ spooked Wolf Street, his Health Secretary, Kennedy minor, heralds a ‘Liberation Day’ for bugs. His opposition to fluoride is marginal to Congress’s being the puppet of the poisonous food industries – Messrs Sugar, Fat and Salt Inc.
In May 2018, Trump’s National Security advisor, John Bolton, halved the staff at the Directorate of Global Health, Security and Biodefense which had been charged with preparing for the next pandemic, which every expert knew would strike, as it did under two years later. The Coalition promises to drop a $250m Centre for Disease Control on the grounds that not enough Australians died from Covid-19 to justify the strain on the budget.
Trumpite attacks on the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, his pack’s demonizing of Dr Anthony Fauci, chief Medical Advisor to President Biden.
One consequence is waning support for getting jabbed. As of February, only 47.4 percent of over-65-year-olds in the U.S. of A. had been vaccinated against flu. Tariffs will make pharmaceuticals even less affordable to a majority of the U.S. population not covered by Medicare. Here the vaccination rate for the coming winter is down from 69 to 61 percent.
Ending funds for immunisation programs overseas will increase pools of T-B, malaria and polio, allowing new variants to establish themselves, and to enter the U.S. of A. and other first-world nations.
The result would be more years of lock-downs, supply-chain disruptions and budget blow-outs from falling Gross Domestic Products, economic impacts not to be reversed by the flourish of a fountain pen.
How much longer shall we have to ponder Wallace Stevens’s dilemma:
I do not know which to prefer
…
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.
Humphrey McQueen writes from Canberra where euthanizing Indian mynas is a civic duty, rabbits run riot, and the annual cull of kangaroos is a matter of pistols at dawn.
Comments
A very good article here from Humphrey McQueen. Try as we might, we will always be part of Nature and her biosphere, and will never be able to stand outside of it: not even if we help Elon Musk colonise Mars, and buy units in his apartment blocks up there.
And Nature always bats last in the game.