[This spring, a virulent strain of bird flu ripped through U.S.
farms. The public hardly noticed. That we could ignore the disease
shows just how little we’ve learned about the origin of new
viruses.]
[[link removed]]

WILL THE NEXT PANDEMIC START WITH CHICKENS?  
[[link removed]]


 

Boyce Upholt
September 19, 2022
The New Republic
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_ This spring, a virulent strain of bird flu ripped through U.S.
farms. The public hardly noticed. That we could ignore the disease
shows just how little we’ve learned about the origin of new viruses.
_

, ALAMY

 

In the right conditions, you cannot mistake the fact that you’re
near an industrial chicken farm. There’s a walloping odor of mold
and feces, even death, as if you’ve come upon a raccoon corpse
rotting in a creek. Or that’s how Greg Lanc describes it.

Lanc grows corn and soybeans on a plot of land in Butler County,
Nebraska, a half-mile north of a massive industrial chicken farm.
Within three miles lie two other chicken facilities, built over the
last few years, putting Lanc’s home in the middle of a collective
metropolis of more than two million chickens. “You constantly
wonder, do I smell?” Lanc told me when I visited this summer.
“Like my clothes, my house—if I go somewhere, do I smell like dead
chickens?” I felt lucky that the summertime heat helped dampen the
stench.

Had I been here in March, Lanc said, it would have been overwhelming.
He’d been worried, given that a virulent strain of avian influenza
was surging
[[link removed]] through
the country’s poultry farms. Indeed, late in the month, the Nebraska
Department of Agriculture confirmed
[[link removed]] that
the epidemic had reached Butler County. The agency did not announce
which farms were infected, but it was not hard for Lanc to ascertain.
He drove the county’s unpaved roads until he found a site where the
commotion made it clear the birds inside were being, to use the
industry euphemism, “depopulated.” Once killed, they would be
rendered into compost, which would eventually be spread across local
fields.

Two weeks after that announcement, Lanc came home to find the smell so
strong that, even indoors, even with the windows shut, he had no
appetite. So he leashed his black Lab and walked across his
neighbor’s fields to investigate. The compost bins on the farm
nearest his house, he noticed, were so full that the carcasses were
spilling over the top. The soil near the compost bins had been
recently tilled, and Lanc could see bones and feathers scattered
across the surface, as if dead chickens had been mixed into the ground
to make more room in the bins. There had been no public announcement
that this farm was infected with avian influenza, but it was clear to
Lanc that, one way or another, a lot of birds had died. When he filed
an official complaint with the county health department about the
odor—and the potential health risks—he was told there was nothing
it could do.

In April, compost sheds at Wolfpack Farm, adjacent to Greg Lanc’s
homestead in Butler County, Nebraska, were piled so high with dead
chickens that the carcasses spilled over a concrete wall. Courtesy of
Greg Lanc

Consider this pile of chickens just one grim snippet from yet another
plague year. In Wisconsin, television news reporters caught footage
[[link removed]] of
crews, some clad in white hazmat suits, pushing wheelbarrows full of
dead chickens onto a loading dock. Nearly three million corpses were
dumped into truck after truck. In early April, three fox kits in three
separate Michigan counties were found
[[link removed]] shaking
and walking in circles; all three tested positive for avian influenza
and died. An additional kit that also tested positive survived, but it
was blinded and could not be released back into the wild. This summer,
samples from dead seals tested positive
[[link removed]] for
the virus. Given the 170 corpses that washed up along Maine’s
beaches in June and July, more than twice the usual number, it seems
likely that many more seals contracted influenza, too.

For most Americans, this devastation has amounted to little more than
a blip on the evening news—the price of eggs gone up
[[link removed]]. Nearly
three years into our own still-raging pandemic
[[link removed]], perhaps it’s hard to care
about chickens, even when they’re dying by the tens of millions
[[link removed]]. But that
very fact—that it’s easy for us to ignore trouble in the ecology
that surrounds and supports us—also shows what little we’ve
learned about how pandemics begin. The expansion of U.S.-style
industrial agriculture across the globe has driven the spread of
viruses. It’s more than possible that the next Covid, or something
far worse, could emerge on our own farms.

Every viral pandemic since the dawn of the twentieth century seems to
be the result of the same phenomenon: “spillover,” in which a
virus adapted to some other species finds its way into human bodies.
The SARS-CoV-2 spillover has become the most famous, and genetic
analysis supports the idea that this leap occurred
[[link removed]] in
a live market in Wuhan, China. In reaction, the Chinese
government banned
[[link removed]] the trade, sale,
and consumption of most wild animals. The World Health Organization
has called
[[link removed]] on
other countries, too, to halt any trade of live or minimally processed
wild mammals—or bushmeat, as it’s sometimes called.

 

Every viral pandemic since the dawn of the twentieth century seems to
be the result of the same phenomenon: “spillover,” in which a
virus adapted to some other species finds its way into human bodies.

These are worthwhile steps, to be sure, though we shouldn’t let
ourselves presume that thereby we’ve solved the problem. Bushmeat is
an easy target, at least for Americans, since it seems distant and
dirty, the kind of commodity that a real civilization would have
already left behind. But the global wildlife trade is responsible for
a tiny fraction of disease outbreaks, pointed out Colin Carlson, a
biologist at Georgetown University who studies infectious diseases and
global change. As for pandemics—the rare but consequential diseases
that manage to spread across international borders—“it’s this
one,” Carlson told me. “It’s just this one.”

The worst pandemic in modern history rocked the world in 1918: 500
million people infected, 50 million killed. Today, in our more
populous world, an equally vicious virus would kill
[[link removed]] 200
million people, more than 30 times the death toll of Covid-19 so far.
The disease is remembered today as Spanish flu, though that name does
not record where the pandemic began, just one country where the press
was willing to admit to the scale of the problem. Virologists now
believe that it emerged from birds on a farm in Kansas, then spread to
a nearby military base, whose soldiers helped carry it across the
world. It’s a reminder, Carlson noted, that a pandemic can start
anywhere, even here in the United States. It’s also a reminder of
why flu is so troubling: It can infect the domesticated animals we
raise. The biomass of the world’s poultry is three times that of all
the wild birds combined. Pigs, which can also carry the flu, make up
even more biomass. That’s a massive stockpile of virus, no bushmeat
needed.

Typically, a strain of influenza that affects chickens cannot invade
human cells, nor vice versa. Thus, for many years, when poultry flocks
suffered from “highly pathogenic avian influenza,” or HPAI—the
broad name given to any influenza strain that results in rapid and
widespread chicken death—no one much worried about the human risk.
The reason is hemagglutinin, one of the two key proteins that make up
the virus’s outer shell. Hemagglutinin binds with the surface of
target cells in a host’s body, imitating the attack. But not all
cells are the same, and the shape of the hemagglutinin determines
which cells a virus can open, something like a key fitting into a
lock.

The calculus changed in 1997, after an outbreak of bird flu struck
Hong Kong. Eighteen people contracted the flu; six died: a stunning
mortality rate. The only blessing was that the virus seemed incapable
of jumping from human to human. Every case in Hong Kong appeared to
involve direct contact with birds. So after every domesticated bird in
the city was killed—1.5 million in total—the crisis came to an
end.

That’s small comfort, really: As the succession of recent
Covid variants
[[link removed]] has
demonstrated, viruses are shifty. Once they invade a host, they turn
its cells into maniacal Xerox machines, churning out copy after
error-riddled copy of their genome. Given the rapid rate of
reproduction involved, evolution can proceed at hyper-speed. The human
genome has evolved just 1 percent over the past eight million years.
Many RNA viruses can change that much in just a few days.

Even this process, at least, is somewhat predictable, or predictable
enough that scientists can update the flu shots each season. Our
immune systems crank out antibodies that match the shape of the
viruses our bodies have encountered; if we can correctly guess what
strain of hemagglutinin may dominate in the coming year, virologists
can create matching vaccines.

The bigger worry, then, is a second trick: When two different
influenza viruses invade the same cell, segments from the genome of
each may be grabbed up and packaged into a single, new viral beast.
This process is known as reassortment. Most of the time, the result
will enfeeble the virus. Not always, though.

Say there is a particularly savage form of chicken flu that can unlock
a human cell but is not passed easily among people—the kind of virus
that struck Hong Kong, for instance. Put that virus inside a human
body that is already infected with the seasonal flu and, voilà, by
reassortment, a supervirus might emerge: highly deadly, spread easily,
unknown to human immune systems. It’s the kind of scenario that
keeps virologists up at night.

Though debate remains, something like this appears to have triggered
the 1918 pandemic. We know more definitively that the two following
influenza pandemics, in 1957 and 1968—which each killed at least a
million people—resulted from avian-human viral reassortment. The
outbreak in Hong Kong was the result of reassortment, too, though of a
different kind: The virus that emerged there mixed up genes from
various bird species, domestic and wild. Human-adapted viral genetics
played no part: It was just dumb evolutionary luck that yielded a form
of hemagglutinin that could unlock the human cells, the equivalent of
a million monkeys pounding on keyboards and yielding Shakespeare.

The great fear in 1997 was that this savage new virus would reassort
once more, and gain the superpower of easy human-to-human spread.
Thankfully, that has not happened. Still, the past quarter-century has
been plenty eventful when it comes to avian influenza: More than 800
people have contracted
[[link removed])%20in%20Hong%20Kong.] the
virus, and more than half of those have died. Other strains of bird
flu have proved capable of jumping to humans, too, and humans have
passed the disease among themselves, though never in high numbers. But
the strain of influenza first identified after the Hong Kong outbreak
is still out there, morphing and changing its genetic code, spreading
through more and more birds, further across the globe.

Today, more than 20 percent of migrating ducks, gulls, and shorebirds
are known to carry some form of influenza. Often they are
asymptomatic, even when they contract a virus that is deadly to
turkeys and chickens. Good news for ducks, perhaps, but less so for
the rest of us: As asymptomatic carriers, they can spread the disease
far and wide as they soar across the continents, leaving virus-filled
shit as mementos of their passage. In 2006, in an attempt to track the
HPAI strain that first hit Hong Kong as it began to spread beyond
Asia, the U.S. Department of Agriculture launched
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surveillance program, which included the collection of
hunter-harvested birds from each state to test for HPAI.

In late 2014, waterfowl began dying en masse along the Pacific Coast.
The surveillance program revealed that HPAI had arrived on our shores.
Over the next few months, HPAI spread eastward, eventually ravaging
[[link removed]] Midwestern
poultry farms. No human infections were documented, but the
consequences were still devastating: Once a single chicken contracts
this virus, you can expect the entire flock to die, though not before
they suffer symptoms like internal hemorrhaging, swollen heads, and
loss of coordination. Diarrhea and nasal discharge scatter new bits of
virus across the farm. Fifty million birds were killed in an effort to
contain the outbreak; the U.S. government spent $879 million cleaning
up the mess.

Subsequent genetic analysis suggested
[[link removed]] that
the virus that spread across farms in 2015 was another reassortment:
Some of its genes were drawn from the strain that killed in Hong Kong
in 1997, while some came from a milder strain native to North America.
This mixture allowed government messaging to have it both ways. The
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in an apparent effort to
quell any panic, declared it a homegrown virus. “North American
lineage avian influenza viruses have very rarely infected people,”
officials wrote
[[link removed]],
emphasizing that the deadly “Asian” strains had not been found in
the United States. The USDA, however, emphasized that the 2014
virus _did_ contain genes derived from Asia—as if only a foreign
invader could explain the problems on U.S. farms.

Genetic studies suggested that the virus jumped into domestic
populations only once; the subsequent spread was farm-to-farm—and
driven by the industry itself. Perhaps local sparrows were infected
thanks to sloppy disposal of infected chickens, then sneaked into
barns. Perhaps someone walked around carelessly in feces-stained
boots. Perhaps, as some farmers believed, the wind carried the
disease, and it was sucked into barns via intake fans. In the
precarious system of industrial farming we’ve adopted, any one of
these small actions can result in the deaths of millions of birds.

A hundred years ago, chickens were nearly everywhere: More than 90
percent of U.S. farms had poultry, and sold the eggs and meat locally.
As late as 1930, the average flock contained around two dozen birds,
though by then farms on the Delmarva Peninsula were conducting the
first experiments in growing chickens by the tens of thousands.
Farmers pioneered new technologies: They combined cheap corn with
vitamins and antibiotics to pump the birds up to heftier weights. They
used artificial lighting to override the limits of natural growth
cycles. By the 1970s, a midsize flock might contain 100,000 birds. The
industry was becoming vertically integrated, too: From the feed mill
to the hatchery to the processing plant, everything became absorbed
into a small set of big-name companies like Tyson and Perdue Farms.
Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, the number of
chickens in the United States exploded—growing more than a
thousandfold in just six decades—while the number of chicken farms
dropped by 98 percent. Today, the local “farmers” who raise
chickens are better thought of as babysitters
[[link removed]],
feeding corporate-owned grain to corporate-owned chickens, which, once
they grow big enough, will be trucked to corporate-owned
slaughterhouses, sliced apart, wrapped in plastic, and stamped with
corporate logos.

This system depends on a strange new kind of bird, unlike any chicken
in the wild, its genes shaped through years of human selection to
promote astounding rates of growth. Throughout the twentieth century,
the average weight of a “broiler,” as a meat chicken is known in
the industry, increased by nearly two-thirds; the time it took to grow
that big dropped by 60 percent. Chicken genes have become intellectual
property, owned mostly by just two companies, which is why the
chickens raised on modern farms sound more like Apple products than
animals: the Ross 308, the Cobb 500, and so on
[[link removed]].

This bizarre ecosystem—a barn full of genetically identical
birds—is, it turns out, a hothouse for viruses. Typically, their
parasitic nature imposes a limit on virility: Kill too many hosts, and
you’ll have no one left to infect. A million or more birds packed
together, though, means there’s no dead end: just more and more bird
bodies for the virus to invade. Even without reassortment, then, these
farms produce superflus. In a 2018 study
[[link removed]],
published in _Frontiers in Veterinary Science_, a team of researchers
found that since 1959, when influenza was first identified in birds,
commercial flocks in high-income countries have been the site of more
than three dozen viral conversions, wherein fairly mild forms of bird
flu have morphed into HPAI.

These flus, along with other diseases, have prompted the birth of a
strange new phrase: “biosecurity.” Farms became the sorts of
places where workers need to wear overalls and boot covers and submit
to footbaths—if not full showers—when entering, where vehicles
need to be disinfected at the gate. It’s a vision of the farm as a
sealed world, entirely separate from nature.

This regime extends beyond chickens. Alex Blanchette, an
anthropologist at Tufts University, studies the U.S. pork industry;
his research
[[link removed]] has
included fieldwork inside production facilities. In the midst of an
outbreak of the alarmingly named porcine epidemic diarrhea virus
[[link removed]]—which
swept across the country in 2013, killing 10 percent of the nation’s
pigs—Blanchette noticed companies going to extraordinary lengths to
maintain biosecurity. Management examined pay stubs to make sure that
if various employees lived together, they all worked in the same
facility. That way human contact could not provide the virus a
mechanism to spread across the farm. A manager who supervised the kill
floor knew he was not supposed to get beers after work with a manager
overseeing the rearing facility. Blanchette told me it was only
recently that he acquired the language to describe what was happening
within the company: This was a form of social distancing. On a pig
farm, he said, everyday life “is kind of like a casual pandemic.”

A decade after the bird flu emerged in Hong Kong, an epidemiologist
named Rob Wallace co-published a paper
[[link removed]] that, by
tracking the virus’s changing genome, confirmed that the virus had
emerged in Guangdong, China, the province where many of Hong Kong’s
chickens were raised. But Wallace was haunted by questions that
genetic sequences could not answer: Why Guangdong? Why 1997? He found
himself stumbling into new disciplines in which he wasn’t always
entirely comfortable: sociology, geography, political economy.

It’s not wrong to think of Guangdong as a viral hot spot. Once
filled with wetlands, and home to many wild birds, this strip of land
in southeastern China endured “one of the greatest migration events
in human history,” as Wallace puts it. Rural villagers poured into
what’s become China’s most populous province. Ecosystems were
tarnished and removed; backyard flocks colonized urban slums at the
same time that U.S.-style production revolutionized local agriculture.
Between 1985 and 2000, China’s poultry production jumped nearly
tenfold.

In March, workers from the U.S. Department of Agriculture traversed a
pit where millions of chicken carcasses had been dumped. The Iowa
property belongs to Rembrandt Foods, one of the world’s largest egg
factories. Dan Brouillette

If industrial farming is a recipe for HPAI, industrial farming amid
such chaos is a recipe for global catastrophe. The mangled ecosystem
doubles as a stirred-up pot of viral populations, as species—birds
wild and domestic, mammals, humans—all cross paths. It’s
reassortment just waiting to happen, in other words. The same
2018 _Frontiers in Veterinary Science_ study that cataloged viral
conversions in high-income countries noted that wet markets in Hong
Kong and China alone have, through reassortment, produced highly
pathogenic strains of influenza at least 42 times. The same process
has been repeated in other countries with transitioning
economies—places where “traditional” poultry farms are being
replaced by modern, intensive production systems. And it’s not just
bird flu. After people across the world became infected with H1N1
influenza in 2009, virologists identified
[[link removed]] the
strain as a reassortment, and pinpointed pig farms in Mexico as the
source. The first infections were detected in California. It’s one
of the few pandemics that in the United States we do not identify by
its site of geographic origin.

Other infamous viruses—like Ebola and, yes, SARS-CoV-2—arrived not
on farms, but from wildlife. Wallace makes a compelling case,
nevertheless, that the root cause is really the same: the global
expansion of an agricultural system that was pioneered in the United
States and seems to consider any form of ecological destruction
justified if it leads to cheaper food and greater profit. Forests must
be clear-cut, leaving less space for wild species. As the local
economy gets supercharged, bushmeat hunting can grow in scale, too, so
food can be supplied in mass quantities. By treating the world’s
ecosystems as a resource to be mined, we’ve opened Pandora’s box,
setting its once far-flung viruses on new paths of collision.

Such a view upends the typical geography of hot spots: The spillover
may happen in the developing world, but the problem originates,
really, in the so-called First World. Indeed, every public-health
biologist I talked to hated the way these viruses are depicted as
exotic problems. Jason Rohr, an ecologist focused on public health,
told me that our First World appetite for more and more products means
resources are stripped out of the developing world and scattered
across the globe. Our First World appetite for travel has airplanes
linking every distant node. “If we just got rid of the developed
world and strictly had the developing world, I think there’d be way
less risk of a pandemic.”

The first
[[link removed]] infected
birds to reach the United States this year—or at least the first
birds we know about—were an American wigeon and a blue-winged teal.
Both were shot down in the marshes along the Edisto River, just
southwest of Charleston, South Carolina, this January. We expected
these birds, really: Europe was already in the midst its
worst-ever outbreak
[[link removed].] of
bird flu, and in late 2021, the disease reached Canada, too.

Within a week of those first detections, the scale of the problem
became clear. Infected birds appeared hundreds of miles away, in North
Carolina, then in Virginia and Maryland and Florida. By February 8,
the inevitable happened: A turkey flock in Indiana suffered increased
mortality. The samples sent to a laboratory confirmed that, as
suspected, the problem was influenza—in particular the strain the
USDA now dubs the “Eurasian H5.” (Influenza viruses are classified
by the structure of their surface protein; the “H5” label
indicates one of 18 known configurations of hemagglutinin.)

The disease spread rapidly, first up and down the East Coast, then
westward toward the heartland. An outbreak in mid-March at a single
farm in Iowa forced the slaughter
[[link removed]] of
5.3 million chickens. According to the _Storm Lake Times Pilot,_ the
birds were killed by “VSD+,” or ventilation shutdown: The air in
the barns was turned off so that the temperature rose until the birds
both suffocated and overheated. (The “plus” refers to the
suggested addition of more heat and/or carbon dioxide, which helps
asphyxiate the chickens.) Activists from an organization called Direct
Action Everywhere raided
[[link removed]] the
plant after the culling; a video they released showed that a few dazed
chickens had somehow managed to survive the heat. Corpses and viscera
lined the floor.

VSD+ is controversial for obvious reasons, though really there is no
pleasant way to kill several million birds, especially when speed is
of the essence. And one of the takeaways from the 2015 outbreak was
the need for more speed: The USDA figured that birds had managed to
shed too much virus, in feces and vomit, before they were killed. The
agency set a new goal of dispatching infected flocks within 48 hours
of a presumed infection, if not half that time. So VSD+ was added to
the list of approved emergency depopulation methods.

Most of the chicken farms in Butler County, Nebraska, supply
[[link removed]] a
cult favorite foodstuff: the $4.99 rotisserie chicken at Costco. To
keep that low price—the store’s signature loss leader—Costco has
begun to work outside the four-way oligopoly of big chicken companies.
A company called Lincoln Premium Poultry, described
[[link removed]] by
a spokesperson as “created for Costco in collaboration with
Costco,” opened a plant in Fremont, Nebraska, in 2019. That same
year, the first new barns were built in Butler County. Next came the
trucks, delivering chicks and picking up full-grown broilers ready for
slaughter—leaving slow snowstorms of white feathers in their wake.
Finally, this spring, bird flu followed: Five days after the infection
in Iowa, one of Butler County’s massive chicken farms tested
positive, too.

As Greg Lanc drove me on a tour of the county—recounting where he
saw men in hazmat suits during the outbreak, noting the creeks and
lakes where he’s sampled the water and found alarming bacterial
growth—the truck often shuddered over potholes. “This is
typical,” he said. “Our roads just get their ass beat.” It’s
one of the hidden costs of the chicken farms, which are serviced by a
constant supply of trucks transporting chickens and delivering feed.

The dirt highways ran in perpendicular lines, perfectly geometric
axes, over the gently rippling landscape of corn and soybeans, creeks
and grassy marshes. Every few minutes, on the far horizon, a line of
silver would appear: the roofs of another set of barns in the
distance.

In 2019, Jonathan Leo, an environmental lawyer who helped locals fight
Costco’s move into Nebraska, compiled a list of all the barns that
supplied Lincoln Premium Poultry. “I saw this cluster of gigantic
barns in Butler County that was unlike any other concentration of LPP
barns anywhere else in the state of Nebraska,” he told me. These
were huge facilities—up to 16 barns per site, with each barn home to
roughly 47,500 chickens—and five were owned not by locals, but by a
North Carolina–based firm called Gallus Capital. Butler County, Leo
noted, has no zoning restrictions. Like China, like Africa, this piece
of rural Nebraska had been rendered a site for absentee landlords to
wring out profit.

Last year, the activist group Mercy for Animals released videos
depicting the gruesome conditions in one of the barns that supplies
LPP. Some of the birds had grown so heavy that they could no longer
stand; stuck on their backs, they’d been trampled by their cousins.
The video prompted a _New York Times_ op-ed
[[link removed]],
in which the general counsel for Costco said the images depicted
“normal and uneventful activity”: a glimpse, then, of what life is
like inside the barns in Lanc’s backyard, where each six-pound bird
gets less than one square foot of space. An LPP official told me that
the company is seeking strategies to improve animal welfare, though
she cited no specific changes implemented since the video’s release.

In 2021, Mercy for Animals, an advocacy organization, photographed
conditions at a Costco industrial farm in Nebraska. Left: A warehouse
held chickens in tight proximity. Right: A worker shoveled dead
chickens into piles. Courtesy of Mercy for Animals

Lanc, in his late forties, favors a black baseball cap, its bill just
barely curved, and sports slightly bushy sideburns. He looks less like
a farmer than a skater—or race car driver, in this case, a sideline
hobby for much of his life. He worked for a while, too, selling race
car equipment. “I’ve worked a job my entire life,” he told me,
“sometimes two jobs, just to keep being a farmer.” His 200-acre
farm is less than half the size of the average farm in the county, but
he considers it a family heirloom. His great-grandmother bought a
portion of the homestead nearly a century ago. Now he’s looking for
ways to escape the stench. One of Lanc’s neighbors, Sam Barlean,
told me he’d already bought a house in the nearby town of David
City. “Had to friggin’ run like hell, man,” he said.

After the positive tests in Butler County, the Nebraska Department of
Agriculture followed national regulations and imposed
[[link removed]] a 6.2-mile “control area”
surrounding the infected barns. Any farm within that circle would be
subject to increased testing, and needed permits before moving
chickens, which typically requires a flock to test negative twice, two
days in a row. Nonetheless, the morning after one of the infections
was announced, Lanc drove past one facility, named S&S Broilers, where
chickens were being loaded into trucks. This was less than a
quarter-mile downwind from a second facility, owned by Gallus, that
appeared to be infected. “It was absolutely crazy,” Lanc said: It
felt like a recipe for sending virus-infected chickens out into Costco
stores across the country.

The Nebraska Department of Agriculture said that the S&S Broilers
flock had been immediately tested and came back negative, so the birds
were moved at once, without waiting for a second day’s test. After
consultation with the USDA, a permit was granted allowing the chickens
to be shipped to slaughter. The USDA did not respond to a request for
clarification on why the permit was granted.

The owner of S&S Broilers did not respond to phoned and emailed
requests for comment. In an interview, Jody Murphey, the managing
partner of Gallus Capital, declined to confirm whether avian influenza
hit any of his company’s barns. But he emphasized how seriously he
and other producers take the illness. “It’s the last thing we
want,” he said. “It’s not good for our operations. It’s not
good for the industry as a whole. It’s something that we want to
keep at bay.” As for the overflowing compost bins that Lanc
observed, Murphey guessed that a _different_ virus was the culprit,
perhaps a kind of hepatitis that has been plaguing the industry for
more than a year. The resulting mortality sometimes forces farmers to
“be creative in how we cover [carcasses] and how we turn the compost
piles,” he said. Jessica Kolterman, the director of administration
at Lincoln Premium Poultry, acknowledged that at the time of Lanc’s
complaint, a local grower “was not adhering to best management
practices related to composting,” an issue LPP immediately
addressed.

No one I asked, however—not Murphey, not the Nebraska Department of
Agriculture, not Lincoln Premium Poultry—said they were aware of a
second problem that Lanc had observed: manure being loaded onto trucks
at one of the Gallus-owned barns near his house, within the control
area, another act that should have required permits. (Lanc had
notified the county, while Barlean had reached out to state and
federal officials.) It made Lanc wonder how much more could happen at
these farms beyond the notice of the people who were supposed to be in
charge. The entire quarantine seemed so slipshod, really: Lanc and
Barlean both told me that no agency ever reached out to signal that
their homes lay near an outbreak of this flu. They saw ducks and geese
swimming in pools of rainwater next to piles of rendered chicken
carcasses; workers discarded two hazmat suits in the roadside ditch
near Lanc’s house. Lanc said he’d asked the county sheriff to
remove them, but when I visited four months after the outbreak, the
suits were still there, dusty and dried out by the sun.

By the end of April, as the outbreak passed its peak, more than 37
million birds had been culled
[[link removed]] across
the country. In the United States, at least, the death toll was lower
than in 2015, which perhaps suggests that, despite the laxity Lanc
observed, farmers have tightened their biosecurity. On the other hand,
this year’s virus found new classes of victims. The 2015 outbreak
hit mostly turkey and egg farms, where the birds live relatively long
lives, and therefore have more time to contract a virus. This year,
broilers suffered, too—as have a wide range of species. More than 50
wild avian species tested
[[link removed]] positive
in North America, twice as many as in 2015. So have several mammals:
the foxes and seals, along with bobcats and a coyote pup, among
others
[[link removed]].
For the first time in the United States, we can add humans to the
list. A prisoner in Colorado, who was euthanizing infected birds as
part of a work-release program, tested positive
[[link removed]] in
late April. The United Kingdom suffered
[[link removed]] its
first human infection, too, a 79-year-old man who owned 125 ducks.
Fortunately, both patients recovered.

How worried should we be? While this virus’s ability to infect
mammals is alarming, it remains unlikely that you, reader, will come
down with it, unless you make some stupid decisions: wading
incautiously through piles of goose shit, say, or eating raw birds.
But you can think of the biblical stories that emerged this year as a
reminder that your concern is overdue. Bird flu need not be highly
pathogenic to launch a human pandemic; recent studies suggest that the
outbreaks in both 1957 and 1968 seem to have involved mild strains of
bird flu that reassorted with human viruses. Even when
birds _aren’t_ dying in huge numbers, we need to be worried about
the flu.

We live amid a cloud of virus—and not just influenza, as first
SARS-CoV-2 and now monkeypox
[[link removed]] have
proved. Colin Carlson recently co-published a paper
[[link removed]] that
modeled how the ranges of several thousand mammal species will shift
as the climate changes. These ranges are transforming already, he
found: Species are crossing paths, bumping into strangers, exchanging
their viruses. Carlson estimates that these new interactions could
produce 15,000 spillover events in the coming decades. Each is a
potential pandemic. “You cannot put the Anthropocene back in the
bottle,” he says.

Chicken, meanwhile, is on pace to become the world’s most-consumed
protein
[[link removed]] within
the next few years. In some ways, we might consider that a good thing.
International officials have developed various “pathways” that
predict how the world might change, in terms of global warming and
economic development. The more hopeful futures—in which warming is
relatively contained and people are still able to eat enough
food—involve a shift away from beef production, with a corresponding
increase in chickens and pigs. A rise in chicken farming means that,
even if we shutter every live bird market and somehow stop the
bushmeat trade, the peril of spillover remains, and in fact is
increased. “There is no way out of flu,” Carlson said. “We can
close all the other doors, and it will just be us sitting alone in a
room with the inevitability of flu pandemics. That is something that I
think is not at all in conversations in this space right now, which
freaks me out.”

Part of the answer, Carlson believes, has to be a better global public
health system. Spillover is ecological, yes, but not every spillover
results in an epidemic. Not every epidemic spreads to become a
pandemic. “Pandemics happen because we don’t share information
quickly, because we don’t have vaccines ready to go, because the
world is becoming more connected,” he said.

Nonetheless, our food system is approaching a day of reckoning. When I
visited in July, Nebraska had been flu-free for months—heat can kill
the virus—but the disease had just begun to hit backyard flocks in
Nevada and Oregon, as well as one commercial turkey farm in Utah.
Across the country, from Florida to Minnesota to Oregon, samples from
wild birds were still yielding positive tests. This pattern of spread
suggests that HPAI is now endemic in certain wild birds. They will
deliver this virus again and again, each time they wing through town.
Scientists have already observed this new regime in Northern Europe.

Vaccines are an important, if complicated, part of the solution.
Sloppy vaccination campaigns can actually drive viral evolution—and
allow the vaccinators to carry the disease from farm to farm. For the
virus to be contained, every one of the billions of chickens and
turkeys and ducks raised in the United States will have to be treated,
an enormously expensive operation. Vaccination can also undermine
disease surveillance, because it’s difficult to distinguish between
infected birds and immunized birds. “Introducing a vaccine is likely
to result in trade restrictions on our poultry and poultry product
markets,” a spokesperson from the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health
Inspection Service indicated to me. The USDA’s research wing
is hoping to develop
[[link removed]] a
vaccine that could be distinguished, somehow, from the wild virus.
Industry leaders are gathering in Europe in October to discuss how to
open a path forward for vaccines.

Jody Murphey of Gallus Capital told me that, after two decades in the
poultry industry, he’s concluded that the United States has the
world’s safest system. “We have biosecurity protocols that are
enforced via contracts,” he said: Vertical integration brings
discipline, in other words. Better to have fewer farms, bigger and
more centralized, than many small farms that are hard to police, and
where birds are likely to bump into their oft-infected wild cousins.
This system also delivers cheap food that can feed a growing world.

In the wake of the crisis, some veterinary experts, too,
have published
[[link removed]] papers
calling for the further intensification of farming. What would that
look like? China offers one potential model: There, pig farms have
been built
[[link removed]] inside
concrete buildings that stand as high as 13 stories and house more
than 10,000 animals inside. Access is so restricted that workers must
wait in a holding zone for two days before heading inside the
quarantined facility. Don’t worry about them: According to a report
[[link removed]-] in _The
Guardian_, the facilities include tennis courts, so the workers
don’t get cabin fever. The idea, in essence, is to create a separate
pigworld, completely severed from the rest of nature. To me, it sounds
less like a farm than a prison, filled with inmates both porcine and
human.

An equally sci-fi option might be to abandon the dirty animals
entirely and instead grow their meat tissues inside of laboratories.
But do we want our food to be produced
[[link removed]] in
industrial labs, with feedstocks and waste streams? What if, instead
of trying to further withdraw from the world around us, we decided to
put ourselves in greater alignment with the ecosystem that supplies
our food?

This is the solution that Rob Wallace has settled on. He now runs an
organization called the Agroecology and Rural Economics Research
Corps [[link removed]], which investigates the potential
for overhauling the food system in the Upper Midwest to create a
healthier and more just planet. Ideally, he thinks, our food would be
produced by many people on small plots of land, amid a diversity of
plants and animals, relying not on chemicals and other industrial
products but on the services provided by the ecosystem itself.

 

You can’t stop spillovers, but if you have biodiversity on the farm,
as well as in the surrounding landscape, diseases won’t spread at
the scale they do now.

The spillover problems at China’s wild-bird markets may make species
diversity seem like an inherent risk. But Wallace believes that nature
itself can provide ­biosecurity: The problem is less
the _number_ of species in a system and more the way they’re
jammed together in unstable configurations. Though the science is
still being debated, in general it appears that intact and biodiverse
ecosystems provide a “dilution effect” that dampens viral spread.
That’s probably because a healthy ecosystem includes some hosts that
easily _catch_ any given virus but don’t effectively spread it:
lots of dead ends. Certainly, sustaining genetic diversity within a
flock can provide biosecurity. Some animals will have inborn genetic
resistance to a virus, which will be propagated to future generations.
Wallace would like to see the reproduction of chickens returned to the
farms, rather than conducted in separate (corporate-owned) hatcheries.
You can’t ever stop spillovers, he told me, but if you have
biodiversity on the farm, as well as in the surrounding landscape,
diseases won’t spread at the scale they do now.

There are potential middle-ground approaches, too. Several companies
have developed new chicken breeds, designed to grow more slowly and
develop more robust immune systems. These can be penned indoors during
migration seasons, but in smaller flocks, so they’re not packed
beak-to-beak. Smaller, slower-growing flocks also mean a single
infection won’t doom millions of birds. Matthew Wadiak, the CEO of a
company called Cooks Venture, told me that by the 1980s, it should
have been clear that the chicken industry was headed in the wrong
direction: Breeders had over-selected for breast size, thereby
compromising the birds’ health—often rendering them immobile—and
as a result our own health, too.

Lanc told me that, in the 1980s, his family still raised their own
chickens. His grandmother’s skillet-fried chicken remains a beloved
memory, though these days he can’t stomach the bird. Other families
maintain the tradition still, and, as it turned out, the Butler County
Fair overlapped with my visit. On my last morning in the county, I
decided to stop by, hoping to chat with a few backyard poultry farmers
about how they’d fared through the outbreak. But when I arrived, the
beef weigh-in was underway, so the open-air poultry barn was mostly
empty: just a few young children wandering from pen to pen, admiring
the menagerie.

I saw hefty white broilers and exotic pigeons, geese, and ducks, along
with one turkey so perfectly formed that he appeared to have been
lifted from the pages of a children’s Thanksgiving book. It was a
slice of wholesome Americana, and, after my several days of
contemplating the perils of modern capitalism, it should have provided
a bit of cheer. Now, however, I could only see these birds as a viral
breeding ground: the potential beginnings of the next mixed-up
superflu. Was this barn the continuation of a timeless tradition, or
one more menace? It’s too soon to know. The answer will depend on
the choices we make: what kind of public health system we build, which
forests we allow to be mowed down—and, in no small part, how we
decide to feed ourselves.

_BOYCE UPHOLT won the 2019 Award for Investigative Reporting from the
James Beard Foundation. He’s working on a book about the Mississippi
River._

_THE NEW REPUBLIC was founded in 1914 as an intellectual call to arms
for public-minded intellectuals advocating liberal reform in a new
industrial age. Now, two decades into a new century, TNR remains, if
anything, more committed than ever to its first principles—and most
of all, to the need to rethink outworn assumptions and political
superstitions as radically changing conditions demand._

_Cofounder Herbert Croly declared that TNR was an
“experiment”—and today we rededicate that experiment, and our
magazine’s legacy, to the urgent challenges of reclaiming the
democratic faith amid dangerous, deranging new upheavals in our common
world._

_Please go to newrepublic.com/subscribe
[[link removed]] or call customer service at (800)
827-1289._

* Pandemic
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* viruses
[[link removed]]
* farming
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* influenza
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* Politics
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* agriculture
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* United States Department of Agriculture
[[link removed]]
* health
[[link removed]]

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