The prospect of a worldwide flu pandemic will challenge outmoded conventions in health and science policy if the threat is realised just as the global economic crisis has unearthed the seeds for chaos that were inherently built into the capitalist economic system culminating in a tipping point that will affect us for generations.
The science community has long anticipated the potential inevitability of another worldwide flu pandemic and cutting-edge work has already been done to study the spread of infectious diseases in the context of complex systems science. However thinking still remains rather conservative and according to my philosophical transactions with an extremely bright scientist this is largely due to the innumeracy of the medical establishment and their continued domination of public health. It remains to be seen just how much this crisis will increase the influence of complex systems thinking, but what it will no doubt demonstrate is the danger of not taking a systems approach to solving complex crises.
The global economic crisis has already demonstrated how governments failed to understand the problem, and how they were too slow in understanding just how interconnected the problem actually was. A failure to understand a system in its overall architecture and the interaction of its components will exacerbate any crisis, as demonstrated in the current economic crisis.
In this emerging health crisis it is critical that we understand swine flu as part of a large interconnected network so that we adopt the right measures to avert a humanitarian crisis and in the event exacerbate the economic crisis that would create a devastating feedback loop.
This is an opportunity for disciplines to share techniques and insights that can enlighten our approach in tackling this crisis whether one is coming from the field of biology, chemistry, epidemiology, economics or political science all can make a significant contribution to elevate our thinking in solving this crisis.
I couldn’t agree more. What’s unfortunate is that, in their effort to ease the economic concerns of disease outbreak over the years, industry leaders and politicians have been encouraging a concentration of the very areas that may be the most likely breeding grounds for pathogenic disease.
As I emphasized in my post, there is quite a substantial body of evidence linking Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) with the potential transmission of virulent diseases. These sites are basically incubators with the ideal conditions for new mutant disease variants to spread: immune-inhibited animals, close proximity to additional hosts, policies that ensure animal fecal material is widely dispersed to infect these hosts, pits of contagion perfect as a breeding ground for the new disease and clear evidence of ground water contagion that allow the mutant variants access to human populations (if they didn’t first infect CAFO employees).
By releasing the products of these closed systems into an open system we are toying with potentially lethal consequences. While it’s currently unclear if a CAFO was indeed involved in the current outbreak of swine flu, I fear it’s only a matter of time before the links are all too obvious.
I think your prediction that we will find a link between CAFO employees and the outbreak of swine flu will highly likely prove to be true. Your post provokes very interesting questions such as the relationship between the environment we create and genetic mutations.
We will no doubt find that this chaos emerged out of a set of simple rules, one of which will be that if you mass produce meat in appalling conditions we will reap the consequences by incubating diseases. Unfortunately it seems that humanity is rather slow in the uptake.
It’s very interesting to observe the interrelationships between ethics, science, economy and politics, and developing a mathematical model around these interrelationships is an exciting challenge.
The mass-production of food was always based on interests like profit or political interests, depending what time and place. None of the factory farming enterprises are concerned about the grave ecological implications involved.
Add global tourism and policy makers, who are weighing the political risks of re-election and losing the lobbying industries in their back versus the costs of a public health system that is well funded, interconnected, interdisciplinary between public authorities as well, as with the scientific community, and the public health will always lose.
The science community still plays the role of Cassandra, while political decisions are made by opportunists. Meanwhile an uninformed population is buying and hoarding Tamiflu. I fear, embracing the complexities of systems is left to complex-thinking minds. But their voices are lost in the political noise.
Alex I think your points highlight the need for scientists to participate more in the political sphere. The ‘dividing lines’ between politics and scientific evidence have too often been blurred. Clearly evidenced based policymaking has yet to really realise its influence, and I anticipate that a new or refined politics will emerge driven by science and communication technologies.