A Deadly Plague of Slums

By Mike Davis, Tomdispatch.com. Posted February 3, 2004.

The narrowness with which we've defined "terrorism" on this planet since 9/11 can take your breath away. Weapons of mass destruction, for instance, are what a few "rogue" states have, or threaten to have, or may suddenly possess. In a sense, it's so convenient because they're so far away. And yet, if you blink a second and take another look, as law professor Jonathan Turley did in the Los Angeles Times a couple of weeks back, you can see WMD of a sort rolling right through the center of heavily defended Washington DC. Quite literally, I'm afraid. CSX, a billion-dollar railroad company that has, in recent years, managed to pay no federal taxes (while receiving $164 million in tax rebates) and a major campaign supporter of our President, controls a stretch of track that cuts through the heart of the capital and the company runs on them "huge tank cars filled with poisonous chemicals, considered by the Department of Transportation as 'toxic by inhalation,'" Turley tells us.

"The same type of chemicals killed thousands of people in 1984 in Bhopal, India. For example, CSX routinely moves 90-ton tank cars of chlorine through the capital, above ground, within four blocks of Congress... Dr. Jay Boris, a senior scientist for the Naval Research Laboratory, recently revealed the expected casualties from just one of the 90-ton tanks of chlorine exploding in a terrorist attack or an accident in the heart of the capital. A poisonous cloud would cover an area within a 14-mile radius of the explosion -- an area made up of federal agencies, Congress, the Supreme Court and the White House. Projected deaths would occur 'at the rate of 100 per second'; an estimated 2.4 million people would be at risk."

While we're constantly on orange alert, grounding European airline flights weekly, and guarding bridges and landmarks day and night against Islamist terrorists, the Bush administration has given in to industry lobbyists and not forced CSX to reroute its trains. And really, that's just a modest example of how little our definition of terrorism fits what is most terroristic on this planet. In the piece that follows on the latest disease to spring to life and threaten our global well-being, Mike Davis lays out the ways in which a deeper terrorism has the potential to threaten us all. -Tom Englehardt, Editor, Tomdispatch

Mass death soon may be coming to a neighborhood near you, and the Department of Homeland Security will be helpless to prevent it. The terrorist in this case will be a mutant offspring of influenza A subtype H5N1: the explosively spreading avian virus that the World Health Organization (WHO) worries will be the progenitor of a deadly global plague.

The most lethal massacre in human history was the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic that culled more than 2 percent of humanity (40-50 million people) in a single winter. Although never proven, many researchers believe that the pandemic was caused by a bird virus that exchanged genes with a human strain and thus acquired the ability to spread easily from person to person. Humans have little immune protection against such species' jumps.

The biological reservoir of influenza is the mixed agriculture of southern China where wild and domestic fowl, pigs (another influenza vector) and humans are brought into intense ecological contact in farms and markets.

Breakneck urbanization, a soaring demand for poultry and pork, and what Science magazine recently characterized as "denser concentrations of larger poultry farms without appropriate biological safeguards" create optimum conditions for the rapid evolution of viruses and their promiscuous passage from one species to another.

Influenza, indeed, is like a viral fashion industry: Every winter it changes styles (glycoprotein coats) to create new strains, but then, perhaps every 30 years, undergoes a revolution (species jump) that unleashes a virulent pandemic.

The last pandemic killed half a million people in 1968, but scientists interviewed by Nature and Science expressed fears that H5N1 might be on the verge of evolving into something more like the 1918-19 monster. Although so far we have confirmation only that it has been transmitted by direct contact with birds and especially their droppings, the current strain is far more lethal than last year's SARS epidemic that caused so much international havoc. As a result, a top researcher told Nature, "Everyone's preparing for the worst-case scenario." At this moment, WHO investigators are checking on the terrifying possibility that the first human-to-human transmission has already occurred in Vietnam.

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