flu, farms and faith (pt. 2)

The following continues Nancy Janisch's stellar series "Flu, Farms, and Faith," the first part of which ran two days ago.  This post looks more closely at zoonotic and other emerging diseases:

Well, not surprisingly, the H1N1 flu is still with us.  We know more than we did, but we still don’t have a clear picture of what is happening.  That will take a while. 

In the last post I provided links to the CDC and WHO influenza sites, and I want to add this page from the New England Journal of Medicine.  You may or may not feel like reading the two original articles, but I would encourage you to read this editorial.  In it Robert Belshe distinguishes between the triple reassortment virus which has been around for several years, and the swine origin influenza virus which is currently infecting people around the world (this article may also help you understand some of the factors which WHO and others have to consider).

As you read this article and others like it, I hope you are getting sense of how complex the subjects of virology, pandemics and epidemiology are.  Viruses, compared to other life forms, are 'simple' and yet they are amazingly complex.  There is a great deal we need to learn about them.  The other thing to realize, as some of the links highlight, is that there are a lot of people and organizations actively looking for the next pandemic and the next emerging disease (see this article from Scientific American).

Of course, related to all of this are zoonotic and emerging diseases.  Did you know that,

In the last 20 or 25 years – and we term this as the age of emerging infectious diseases — approximately 75 percent of the new human diseases that have emerged are zoonotic, and of the 1,461 human pathogens that we know about today, about 60 percent are what we would term “multihost pathogens.”  In other words, they don’t reside just in people by themselves.  Contacts through animals or animal products – even plants — are actually responsible for multihost diseases (American Public Health Association, “Get Ready” interview with Lonnie King from the CDC).

And listen to this from NPR on a Nature article about emerging infectious diseases (here is the abstract).  Now, why am I asking you to read all this?  Because the threat of pandemics, emerging infectious diseases and zoonotic diseases is not going to go away.  These aren’t new problems; there have always been infectious and zoonotic diseases.  But their rate of incidence seems to be increasing, and the causes are complex.

On the one hand, that means this is a job for specialists.  I, for one, am glad there are dedicated professionals on the job around the world.  But on the other hand, the rest of us need to have a basic understanding of these issues.  Public policy is going to be made, and we need to be smart about it. We need all of our abilities, all of our various skills, to make wise decisions.  We need scientists and economists, sociologists and political scientists, and yes, even theologians to be involved.

Ultimately, this isn’t just about infectious disease.  It really is about human interaction with the environment.  Some of the sources I linked to talked about humans hunting and eating bush-meat, and how this enhances the opportunities for emerging diseases to spread.  And as we think about this, we need to consider the social, political and economic realities involved in why people eat bushmeat.

We need to think about the movement of people into previously humanly uninhabited areas, and how war, famine, politics and other social and political realities influence that movement.  We need to think about the global transportation of people, animals and goods and how it contributes to the spread of disease. 

We need to think about the nontherapeutic use of antibiotics in food animals, why it's done, who does it and what the implications are of continuing it, as well as stopping it.  We need to think about the environmental, health, economic and ethical costs of intensive farming practices.

Now, each of us doesn’t need to think about each of these realities with the same degree of complexity.  We can’t all be experts in each area.  But we all do need a basic understanding of all of these issues.

What does our faith have to do with this?  People of faith need to embrace Jesus’ radically inclusive view of our neighbor: the small farmer in southeast Asia, the families hunting for bush-meat and also the confinement hog farmer in the U.S.

People of faith need to be thinking about God’s desires for the world, about how we participate in God’s shalom, his vision of wholeness, health and well-being for all.  To effectively participate in moving towards shalom, we are going to need science and we are going to need information.  We are going to need to think about complex issues in comprehensive ways.

In the next post, we’ll narrow our focus to consider farming practices.

ps - Some of you may be familiar with Francis Collins and his work on the Human Genome project, as well as his book The Language of God.  Dr. Collins and some of his colleagues have a new website on science and faith, The BioLogos Foundation, and a blog on Beliefnet, Science and the Sacred.  Thanks to Bill Tammeus for highlighting these sites on his blog.

(content courtesy and copyright Nancy Janisch, edited from her original post at Conversation in Faith (05/15/09); photo copyright Anest, 123rf.com)