Back from Brazil

As my flurry of posts last weekend probably indicated, I'm back from Brazil. Although I'd only been gone for 15 months, I was really surprised at the changes that had happened, in Brazil and abroad.

The change was evident immediately upon arriving at the airport. Thanks to the H1N1 scare ("influenza suina"), all the travelers on the plane (Brazilian and foreign) had to fill out a sheet saying whether they had had a cough and/or fever in the last 10 days in addition to the regular Customs paperwork. And just to be safe, the officials at the gate and at customs who gave us the papers and took them back all wore masks. I suppose precautions are OK, but it still seems a bit extreme of a response to a disease that a couple thousand people have gotten out of more than 6 billion in the world.

Also at the airport, it was very obvious that Rio is pushing very hard to get the 2016 Olympics. Rio's airport has two terminals; one is new, but one was built in the 1970s, and it shows, not so much in deterioration as in design and lighting. However, the (in my opinion, relatively ugly) walls were all covered with materials indicating that the aiprort is undergoing a major overhaul in its appearance, and there were signs all over showing how the aiport will look with the new walls and better lighting. If it looks half as good as the design looked, it will be a marked improvement. And just in case you weren't sure it was for the Olympics, there were signs all over with comments on getting ready for 2016, boasting of Brazil's ability to host, the changes their making to infrastructure, etc.

While we're on the subject of airports, Sao Paulo has demonstrated it may quite possibly have the stupidest airport security policy outside of the U.S. I have now flown into both airports in Sao Paulo from both airports in Rio, and every time you make a connecting flight, you get off the plane and immediately stand in line. For what. To go through security. Again. You of course go through when you're in Rio, and yet when you get in Sao Paulo, you have to do it all over again. I just don't understand this - it's not like Rio says, "meh, security, smecurity" - it's the same metal detector, the same "remove your laptop," the same time waiting in lines. And I just can't figure out the logic for this - it's not like Brazil has had to deal with a rich legacy of (often-deserved) mistrust from the rest of the world, and there isn't exactly a history of terrorist attacks on Brazil via airports. Even in the U.S., which is way too paranoid in terms of security, you don't have to go through security to make a connection. Maybe there's some logic in Sao Paulo, but I'll be damned if I can figure out what it is.

I will want to deal with the visible effects of Rio's new mayoral administration in another post, but in political news, the PSDB is already gearing up against the PT for the 2010 elections. The commercials I saw weren't actually going after Dilma Rousseff herself, nor after Lula; rather, they were simply critical of the PT in the vaguest of terms, basically trying to frame next year's elections as "PT vs. PSDB." I don't know yet if this is smart or foolish politics; on the one hand, getting people to think just in terms of parties could help the PSDB, but on the other, relying on vague condemnations and showing a lack of any good candidate or policy alternative could backfire. Suffice to say, the content of the commercials themselves was appalling, relying on innuendos, non-controversies, and other baseless vague accusations against the PT. While one can level charges of corruption against all parties in Brazil right now (and for generations back), including the PSDB, the PT is not exactly mired in any scandal - the biggest challenge is facing the centrist-PMDB, whose Jose Sarney (president of Brazil from 1985-1990 and current president of the Senate) is embroiled in an expenses scandal. The PSDB commercial tried to say that the PT was directly involved in that, but most Brazilians (at least, those outside of the middle-class Zona Sul in Rio) are smart enough to understand that Brazil is a parliamentary presidential system, and just because Lula and the PT have to collaborate with the PMDB (and many other parties) in the legislative branch, does not mean that Lula or the PT are giving orders to Sarney.

Finally, in cultural news, O Globo has come out with what is quite possibly the Worst Novela Ever. Called "Caminho das Indias" (Road from Indias - yes, it's pluralized, and no, I don't know why), it has some of the most ridiculous exoticism and historical/cultural innacuracies I've ever seen in any country. The basic plot immediately reveals the ridiculousness - an Indian woman who loved a member of the "untouchable" caste in India is now married to a wealthy businessman, and the "untouchable" has also become a successful businessman, and (of course) the two are competitors not just in the business world, but for the woman's attention as well. There are numerous other ridiculous aspects to the plot that are too convoluted to go into here. However, it should be fairly obvious the ridiculous premise that "love can conquer all," including the caste system. Equally risible is the notion of an "untouchable" becoming a major business leader. While I understand that the caste system is nowhere near as rigid as it once was, it certainly is nowhere near as lax as the Novela makes it out to be. And the good times keep coming. While the main female protagonist passes for an Indian, her character's name is absurd: Maya. Yes, a Brazilian actress playing an Indian named after a Mexican indigenous group. But at least she kind of looks the part, which is more than I can say for either of the two main male characters (the latter of whom played an Italian, with much more success, in his previous novela). And the theme song is the worst mish-mash of an "interpretation" of Indian music and culture ever (keep your eyes open for the Russian-like dancer at about 33 seconds in). I was horrified, but having never been to India, thought I was perhaps overreacting. However, last night I showed the clip to an Indian colleague of mine at work, and she was even more horrified and offended than I was. Well done, O Globo - well done indeed.

Racism and Swine Flu

Brian Alexander has a good piece on how swine flu has emboldened racists. It begins:

“No contact anywhere with an illegal alien!” conservative talk show host Michael Savage advised his U.S. listeners this week on how to avoid the swine flu. “And that starts in the restaurants" where he said, you “don’t know if they wipe their behinds with their hands!”

And Thursday, Boston talk radio host Jay Severin was suspended after calling Mexican immigrants "criminalians" during a discussion of swine flu and saying that emergency rooms had become "essentially condos for Mexicans."

That’s tepid compared to some of the xenophobic reactions spreading like an emerging virus across the Internet. “This disgusting blight is because MEXICANS ARE PIGS!” an anonymous poster ranted on the “prison planet” forum, part of radio host and columnist Alex Jones’ Web site.

And it only gets worse from there. In fact, Americans have shown a shocking amount of racism toward Mexicans in the last few years. First, they stole our jobs when our factories closed. Then they stole our jobs by working in the United States. Then they are feeding us drugs. Then they spreading drug violence over the border. And now they are infecting us with swine flu.

For a poor country, they sure do have an amazing ability to cause all of our problems!

What really disturbs me about this recent surge of racism is the historical connections between race and animal characteristics. From portraying African-Americans as apes to the Japanese in World War II as bugs and snakes to the Irish as dogs, Americans have been more than happy to dehumanize other people by resorting to animal imagery. Connecting Mexicans and pigs may become another example of this.

If this disease wasn't supposedly spreading from Mexico and perceived as a dangerous threat from the South, would people be panicing in the same way?

The media pandemic

In the last couple of days my daily news diet has consisted of letting the morning broadcast blare in the half hour it takes me to get ready and out the door. It’s safe to say that about 20 minutes of the half hour has been about the swine flu.

The media are always looking for that next big issue to rally around; they need to cover airtime, we get it, and they’re not always blessed with a Specter defection or a Biden gaffe or the 100-day itch. Unfortunately or fortunately, it’s easier to see through this thick fog of media hype when it’s a political incident blown out of proportion, but a lot harder when the story deals with a less familiar topic – the two subjects that always come to my mind as big media nemeses are the economy (granted, the media wasn’t alone in this), and the haze that surrounds scientific or medical news stories.

In their urge to get the story out there, fast and loud, journalists don’t ensure if the hype is indeed proportional to the facts. Going by the swine flu coverage it would be hard to believe that the death rate from this flu is the same as that is to be expected from most flus, and that people who have been treated are responding to medication.

Social networking sites, for all their advantages, help feed the frenzy. Swine flu has been among the top three trending tweet topics this week. Of course, blaming Twitter for what people choose to tweet about is sort of like blaming Google for the content it spits out from all across the Web. But even so, a tweet a second about the flu doesn’t help calm down the already disproportionate furor. Including glaringly false Twitter posts like this one: “Swine Flu Confirmed Cases in Mexico is about nearly 3,000.”

Simon Jenkins makes a good point in the Guardian that the death tolls from ongoing wars or a real epidemic like AIDS – which take way more lives than the swine flu ever will – are hardly given the emphasis that a “sudden” outbreak like this one is. This goes back to the age-old media problem: information only attains the status of news when there is an “event” – usually something that is abrupt and unexpected - and when that does happen, the press focuses on the event without covering the context or big picture. Instead of going on and on about the numbers and possible escalation and inevitable doomsday, journalists could have taken this opportunity to talk about larger issues – as Erik’s post did on problems with the meat industry, livestock farming and disease.

What makes this press frenzy nearly pointless is that despite the widespread coverage of swine flu, as Jenkins notes, there are very few steps one can take to consciously reduce the chances of getting it (unless you follow Biden’s advice and lock yourself up in your house, avoiding subways and planes, and well, air).

On the other hand, there is a lot one can do to keep from getting more serious illnesses like AIDS with more difficult modes of transmission where large scale paranoia could actually drill sense into people and save lives.

I don’t intend to belittle this outbreak – of course, the swine flu is significant – it has taken over a hundred lives in Mexico, is spreading rapidly in several countries around the world, and the WHO has raised its pandemic alert level to 5. People should be made aware.

However, the simple truth is that there can’t be much of a preparedness plan against bugs that spread through aerosols and constantly change their surface structure to avoid immune responses.

Richard Besser of the CDC put it best: “microbes don’t read the plan, and you need to move away from the plan pretty soon after day one.”

Putting this in the context of incalculable risk, Ben Goldacre explains – amazingly – why it is almost impossible to assess how much of a risk this could – or could not – be. Hence, according to him people should neither be casting the swine flu as an unstoppable epidemic nor dismissing it as too much hype.

But that’s what the media does – it predicts, and innovates and foretells, be it the result of a presidential election, the length of an ongoing war, or the number of people who are going to die from swine flu.

Where predictions should have been happening is in the scientific community. As this New Scientist article explains, North American pigs have been incubators for these flu viruses for years, and scientists should have seen it coming. Since the late ’90s, the viruses have been evolving by mixing with different strains of human and bird flu viruses, which have made them more virulent. Since its genetic makeup is so novel, it is harder for the human system to target an immune response to.

There is a very real fear that this flu could become a pandemic considering its ease of transmission. But there is also a possibility that this virus - like many viruses before it - may peter out because it may not be able to survive and spread in humans.

No one knows. The media should not be pretending that it does.

More on Swine Flu and Animal Farms

Ann Friedman does a nice job reiterating some of the points I made yesterday about pig farming and swine flu.

And it's worth noting that the last this "H1N1" virus popped up, in 1998, it was found in a North Carolina industrial pig farm. (I'm from Iowa, which isn't as hog-heavy as North Carolina, but I've certainly smelled a poop lagoon. Pig products are no longer part of my diet.)

So no, you don't have to give up your bacon because of the immediate swine flu threat. But if you want to actually diminish the risk of getting this or other potential animal-waste-borne illnesses, giving up factory-farmed meat might be a good idea.

Definitely. Of course that might also mean slightly higher priced pork and I'm not sure that's a tradeoff Americans are willing to make.

What Can We Learn from Swine Flu?

Mike Davis suggests one important lesson--the worldwide meat industry is far too powerful.

Perhaps it is not surprising that Mexico lacks both capacity and political will to monitor livestock diseases, but the situation is hardly better north of the border, where surveillance is a failed patchwork of state jurisdictions, and corporate livestock producers treat health regulations with the same contempt with which they deal with workers and animals. Similarly, a decade of urgent warnings by scientists has failed to ensure the transfer of sophisticated viral assay technology to the countries in the direct path of likely pandemics. Mexico has world-famous disease experts, but it had to send swabs to a Winnipeg lab in order to ID the strain's genome. Almost a week was lost as a consequence....

But what caused this acceleration of swine flu evolution? Virologists have long believed that the intensive agricultural system of southern China is the principal engine of influenza mutation: both seasonal "drift" and episodic genomic "shift". But the corporate industrialisation of livestock production has broken China's natural monopoly on influenza evolution. Animal husbandry in recent decades has been transformed into something that more closely resembles the petrochemical industry than the happy family farm depicted in school readers.

In 1965, for instance, there were 53m US hogs on more than 1m farms; today, 65m hogs are concentrated in 65,000 facilities. This has been a transition from old-fashioned pig pens to vast excremental hells, containing tens of thousands of animals with weakened immune systems suffocating in heat and manure while exchanging pathogens at blinding velocity with their fellow inmates.

When you treat animals like inanimate objects rather than like animals, when you concentrate them into inhumane conditions, and when you turn animal husbandry into an industrial operation, nature is going to strike back. Despite our endless faith in technology to solve all our problems, disease evolves too rapidly to keep it under control. We rely on antibiotics to keep these animals alive, but alive and healthy are two very different things. The amazing ability of viruses to adapt means that if we create conditions that allow viruses to flourish in meat production, they will likely mutate and enter humans. Swine flu is just one of many horrifying possibilities.

Moreover, Davis suggests a major problem in fighting this will be the huge power of the meat industry. This is true. Meat has become an industrial operation on farms owned by very few companies. These companies, including Tyson and Smithfield Farms, operate in nations all over the world, using their massive political and financial might to fight environmental regulations. Rumors abound in Mexico that this latest bout of swine flu started on a Smithfield operation near Veracruz; the reality is that Smithfield's power to halt, stall, or at least influence investigations in Mexico means that we are unlikely to ever find out for sure.

What is the solution? First, eat less meat. Yes, your consumer choices matter. These industrialized meat factories exist to supply the huge and growing demand for meat around the world. Until that demand goes down, there's not a lot of incentive to change these conditions. Second, we need American companies operating abroad to adhere to American environmental (and labor) laws. I've always thought this was the answer to many problems concerning globalization--since these companies were leaving the U.S. to escape labor and environmental legislation and regulations, force them to maintain those regulations, with inspections from the U.S. government, and penalties for violations. Third, and possibly more realistically, is for a popular and government push to clean up the worst problems with these factories, to treat animals humanely, and to come up with ways to mitigate the enormous problems with waste and other environmental issues in these operations.

However, given how poorly we have adapted to the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission, I find it dubious that we will learn any lessons at all from swine flu.