In a recent Newsweek article on the swine flu pandemic, Laurie Garrett ties together two seemingly disparate problems: the global meat industry and “viral sovereignty.” First, she analyzes the swine flu outbreak through the lens of disease ecology, whose vision of pathogenic globalization was a central element in the “emerging disease” framework as initially articulated in the late 1980s.  In this vision, new diseases are constantly emerging due to the conjuncture of natural ecological processes and massive human transformations of the environment:

“We live in a globalized world, filled with shared microbial threats that arise in one place, are amplified somewhere else through human activities that aid and abet the germs, and then traverse vast geographic terrains in days, even hours—again, thanks to human activities and movements. If there is blame to be meted out, it should be directed at the species Homo sapiens and the manifest ways in which we are reshaping the world ecology, offering germs like the influenza virus extraordinary new opportunities to evolve, mutate and spread.”

She then argues, from the vantage of disease ecology, that the global meat industry is the appropriate site of blame for the emergence of the new strain of H1N1 – and for further pandemics to come: “It is a strange world wherein billions of animals are concentrated into tiny spaces, breeding stock is flown to production sites all over the world and poorly paid migrant workers are exposed to infected animals… This is the ecology that, in the cases of pigs and chickens, is breeding influenza. It is an ecology that promotes viral evolution. And if we don’t do something about it, this ecology will one day spawn a severe pandemic that will dwarf that of 1918.” What is striking here is that it is not Mike Davis making the argument that the US meat industry is a zone of virulence, but rather a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

The article then moves from the danger posed by the global meat industry to another danger: what she calls “viral sovereignty.” Here she refers to the claim made initially by Indonesian Health Minister Siti Supari that nation-states have intellectual property rights to H5N1 viruses found in the country, which Supari has used as the basis for refusing to share these viruses with WHO as part of its influenza early warning system (GISN). Garrett writes: “The principle of viral sovereignty directly imperils the entire global community–as well as Supari’s own people.”  The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt has now adopted this position against virus sharing, and further, has demanded that the US Naval Medical Research Unit in Cairo be shut down.

What brings Garrett’s two diagnoses – of the pathogenic meat industry and of dangerous virus politics – together? Disease ecology indicates that we need global transparency to track and contain outbreaks of novel pathogens.  Thus, for Garrett, Mexico provides a model of compliance with the needs of global health surveillance – showing the world “how a responsible nation can respond to a potential pandemic.”