Johann Hari: We face a century of viral pandemics

In the ultra-secure, ultra-safe West, there is one game we obsessively play, and always get wrong - Risk. We are living longer and healthier lives than any generation of humans ever, but we are obsessed with statistically negligible risks, from paedophiles lurking in bushes to BSE lurking in burgers. Somehow, the real, rumbling risks to our safety - like the destabilisation of the planet's climate - get lost in a shifting parade of bogeymen.

When I first began to research bird flu, I thought the real danger was not of a pandemic but a panic-demic. Sir David King, Britain's chief scientist, was struggling to point out that Brits are seven times more likely to win the lottery than to contract the H5N1 variant of avian flu. It's crazy that we are eating less chicken, since avian flu is a respiratory disease and - unless something has gone terribly wrong - your KFC bucket isn't breathing.

But the more I discovered from interviewing experts and reading the scientific papers, the more I realised this was one of those rare scares with real evidence behind it. They urged me to look back to the grimy, war-trashed year of 1918 when - in just 24 weeks - a virulent form of influenza ripped around the world and killed between 40 and 100 million people. But I sighed and thought - why worry about it? Humans have no control over viruses. They are natural biological events. I might as well fret about asteroids hitting the earth. Even though scientists warn that we are "overdue" for a similar outbreak, what can we do?

But gradually it became clear that this complacency was based on a misunderstanding. Viruses live or die in circumstances controlled by man - and over the past few decades, we have unwittingly transformed the world into a virus-heaven, a place where they can develop, multiply and devour better than ever before.

The first virus-friendly change we have made is the incredible interconnectedness of the world. A single doctor on a single day on a single floor of a Hong Kong hotel managed to spread Sars to Singapore, Vietnam, Canada, Ireland and the US without going anywhere, just by coughing and spluttering in the lobby. While the 1918 virus took months to slowly fan across the world - becoming weaker and weaker as it went - today the most virulent strain of a virus will be easyJetted to every continent before we know it exists. The world hasn't just become smaller for e-mail and tourism - it has become smaller for viruses too.

The second shift is the sudden concentration of vast numbers of animals and people in extremely close proximity, providing a swollen feeding pool for viruses. Let's look at animals first. Over the past 20 years, the entire world - from Thailand to India - has adopted the model of poultry farming preached by the Arkansas chicken-mongers, Tyson. This crams together unprecedented concentrations of chickens in massive warehouses. The result? Viruses used to be self-limiting - they would pass through a small flock of birds and then die out - but in these conditions, the virus never runs out of hosts. As the virologist Richard Webby says, "We have a bucket of evolution going on."

Professor Mike Davis has shown that industrial factory-farming has actually sped up the evolution of the flu virus - and even produced evidence suggesting bird flu was born on Thailand's immense chicken production line. The same thing is happening for people: over a billion humans are now crammed into mega-slums across the world, ensuring no virus is ever left behind.

It only takes a few amino acids to mutate in some chicken-factory or distant slum for bird flu to become transmissible human-to-human, 1918-style. Then the lottery odds cited by Sir David King shorten dramatically. Some scientists think this is "inevitable", others "unlikely" - but all agree that even if we dodge a human variant of bird flu this time round, we are facing a 21st century plagued by pandemics because of the new virus-friendly ecology we have created across the world.

Yet to my despairing question "what can we do?", I found there are actually some quite detailed answers. In the long term, it turns out that the morally right things to do are also the best things for human safety. It was always immoral to factory farm chickens in disgusting conditions and to leave a billion people festering in shanty-cities. Now we know it is a matter of national security to end these virus-factories too.

Even more importantly, the bird flu crisis should remind us - with a hard slap in the face - that the only means we have to protect ourselves from these new viruses are currently in the hands of private corporations who put their own right to profit above the right of human beings to life. Tamiflu is the only way we have to protect ourselves against a bird flu epidemic. It is an antiviral developed at an American hospital with tax-payers' money, then developed into a pharmaceutical by a small company in California, but it now is controlled by a $20bn-a-year corporation called Roche. They have been insisting on their sole rights to the drug, no matter how urgent other countries' needs. Only after massive pressure did they agree to license a few other companies to use their patent (for a price, of course). Taiwan, in a state of desperation, has begun to manufacture its own generic version - and may face legal action through the World Trade Organisation for the sin of putting its citizens before intellectual property law.

The scandal of Aids drugs in Africa and South America have already demonstrated how druggernauts are prepared - as the editor of The Lancet, Richard Horton, puts it - "to see literally millions of people die ... to protect their own profits". Even last year's UN-brokered deal - which was supposed to allow developing countries to manufacture cheap imitation Aids drugs for their dying populations - is being held up by Big Pharma, who are insisting countries with virtually no infrastructure "prove" the drugs will not be sold on to other countries before they can begin to make them. (What's a few dying black people when there are shareholders to protect?)

Do we want to enter the looming century of viral pandemics with our antivirals - our lifelines - in the bloody hands of drugs corporations who just watched mass death in Africa and prevented anybody from manufacturing life-saving treatments? (Call it Pharmageddon). Isn't now the time to dismantle the WTO system that serves them and build one based on the spirit of Jonas Salk, the man who invented the polio vaccine but refused to patent it, because it would be "like patenting the sun"? Then we could say that - just once - that our endless game of Risk had stumbled on to something that really mattered.

j.hari@independent.co.uk

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