Bird Flu

Here’s what got me started on that last, Vive La France, post (and segue to this one):

Even before we were bombarded with warnings about Hurricane Wilma, there was escalating panic about bird flu. We are living in an I am sure very temporary illusion that big government and its licensed experts, like big doctors, can let man get away with murder forever. Still, now and again, some scientist gets reported saying, "It ain’t so, Joe."
This is all deliciously apposite to me, because I’ve just been watching the 1995 movie Restoration. However marvelous the movie is in its casting, performances, periodicity, what’s really groovy is how it moves from lower middle class struggle to restored feudalism making up for missing years, to Quakers quietly not going away ... to the Plague hitting London, to the Fire hitting London.
Wasn’t it just three or so hundred years before that plague had put down two-thirds of Europe’s population? (Every school boy knows that: how come not one school boy knows the ratios elsewhere for that time? How many died in Asia? in the sub-continent? in the Middle East?) Yet here we are, London even bigger, even filthier, in the later Seventeen Century than it had been to start the Fourteenth Century. Men moved back onto Mount Vesuvius as soon as the lava had cooled. Even now, men are moving back into New Orleans, where, again, they’ll trust the Army Corps of Engineers.

If I had any say, after the fires of Rome, London, Tokyo, Chicago, San Francisco ... we'd have at least considered a small population back naked on the grass lands, instead of Rome, London, Tokyo, Chicago, San Francisco ten times bigger.

Now: bird flu: what the hell is that? and why am I talking about plague if I’m curious about bird flu?
I don’t know what bird flu is. (I don’t really know what plague was.) Point is, they’re diseases. Diseases are very old. We couldn’t defeat them, not and also live. (If we killed all microbes (maybe we could), we’d die that same hour. Can’t live with some of the bad ones, can’t live at all without the whole of the rest. (I vote to mind our own business, do our thing, and let the diseases do their thing: unimpeded.))

What is very young is epidemics of diseases. Epidemics are only possible with dense populations. Traffic across natural boundaries also helps. Crowds in Asia, a ship to Istanbul, another to Venice ... and crowds die in Rome, in Paris ...
Jared Diamond explains it beautifully: lots of humans imprisoning lots of pigs: that’s how humans get pig diseases. The Neanderthal knew the mammoth would come, and where. They knew where there was a cliff. Fire was controlled by Homo erectus, the Neanderthals had it. Flame-hurling Neanderthals scared the wits out of migrating mammoth on the edge of a cliff. Cro-Magnon were laying in ambush at the pass for the deer, the horse ... that had to come through.
There was contact: the Neanderthal sticks his flint in the mammoth’s ribs, the Cro-Magnon hurls a spear at the horse ... but that could have gone on and on without a Neanderthal getting a mammoth disease (or the mammoth getting a Neanderthal disease; or the Cro-Magnon getting a horse disease (or a horse getting a Cro-Magnon disease). Hell, there weren’t even epidemics among Neanderthals, or among Cro-Magnons! Because few had ever seen more than a few dozen of his kind at one time.

Modern man squats in one place, shits where he squats, and cages every mammoth, deer, and horse he can find, right in the same place. (Did you ever see how chickens are farmed these days? They live in barracks! like draftees! Except that when I was drafted they turned the lights out for four hours of sleep. For chickens we don’t ever turn the lights out!))

Well, actually, mammoth went bye-bye, deer don’t cage well; but we caged everything we could: trees, birds, fish, chickens, pigs ... In the army, in prison, in civilization, everybody squats among the same germs: and then we send emissaries abroad, carrying those microbes. (It’s really amazing that this or that plague didn’t kill 100% on 100% of its chances.)

Well: Diamond traces this and that disease from cow to chicken to man: under human husbandry. I don’t remember any of the traces ripping through wild populations en route. Yet here, with bird flu, it seems that both wild and domestic birds are vulnerable: man potentially vulnerable.

So, please, public: help me out here. Who can trace this (these) disease(s) for me? In particular I want to know, What’s the connection with things that humans have caged? Where are we among the links? Did domestic geese have it before wild geese got it? Did it live in a diaper basket before then? Can ALL birds get it? or only some?

When we get it, will we all live in barracks with the lights on?