Be very afraid

In "The Monster at Our Door," "City of Quartz" author Mike Davis warns that urban poverty has created the perfect conditions for bird flu to kill millions of people.

By Joshuah Bearman

Dec 13, 2005 | It's kind of difficult to identify Mike Davis' precise profession. A Google search turns up many descriptions: public intellectual, iconoclast, American social commentator, sociographer, scientist historian, old-time Commie, one-time big-rig driver. Whatever it may be, the defining characteristic of Davis is that he stays in no single discipline, preferring to combine them all, from urban theory to economic history to paleoseismology, to build a fresh perspective on whatever subject he has chosen for scrutiny. His first book, "City of Quartz" -- originally rejected as his history thesis -- lifted the veil on the Los Angeles power structure to reveal that racism, elitism and class struggle were embedded into the social architecture for preserving the ruling-class status quo, which is perhaps an overly simplistic way of describing a very complex book. The book, which came out in 1990, was well timed. "City of Quartz" also presaged the social unrest that erupted in 1992, earning Davis a strange status of modern-day prophet and making the book required reading in classrooms nationwide.

In 1998, "Ecology of Fear" continued Davis' critique of Los Angeles but added a new component: natural disaster. The book described the doom-laden geography of the city itself -- the flood plains, the fire zones, the earthquake faults -- and described the dangers those disasters represent, both on their own and when amplified by the worst disaster of them all: suburbanization. But he was not content to stay in Los Angeles.

Davis used part of his MacArthur Award funding to take one of his children to Greenland to see the melting Arctic with his own eyes. His books "Under the Perfect Sun," "Late Victorian Holocausts" and "Dead Cities" widen the geography and range of topics of Davis' interdisciplinary investigation. His latest book goes global. "The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu" looks at the potential for an avian flu pandemic, but goes beyond the usual "killer bug" narrative by focusing on the intersection of epidemiology, globalization and the chronic poverty of the developing world.

What follows is my recent conversation with Davis, a man who named one of his own daughters Cassandra, after the one skeptic who said, "Maybe we shouldn't bring that wooden horse inside the walls of Troy."

Your latest book, about the avian flu, is very topical these days. So let's start there. We'll get everybody good and scared. Let's start with the basics. You were working on the topic a few years ago, before it was a big news story. How did you get interested in epidemiology?

This little book, "The Monster at Our Door," is a spinoff of another project called "Planet of Slums," and a chapter in it called "Slum Ecology." I was doing some research on population densities in the slums of very large, very poor cities like Mumbai [India], Kinshasa [Congo] and so on. As I accumulated data and compared it with the major slums of the 19th century -- the Lower East Side of New York, the East End of London -- it became clear that today's third-world slums are an order of magnitude larger than 19th century slums and even denser than the Lower East Side of our great-grandparents' time, and so I had to ask a question: What does this mean for the transmission of disease?

It's a Victorian relapse.

Well, we have a billion people on Earth by the official reckoning of the United Nations, living under dense, sprawled conditions in swamps with appalling conditions of sanitation. And in so many countries the public health infrastructure has been damaged by the International Monetary Fund and structural adjustment policies from the 1980s that forced hundreds of thousands of health workers in Africa and Latin America to immigrate. Now, so many urban people have no access to even elementary healthcare. In other words, it is indeed the Victorian world, writ large.

How does the avian flu fit in?

I decided, then, to take a contagious disease -- an emerging disease -- and think a little bit about what that would mean in terms of today's megaslums as incubators of disease. Avian flu was my choice, and I was somewhat stunned to discover that slums haven't really been factored in. Because, quite honestly, 98 percent of the debate that's occurring about avian flu and other possible epidemics and pandemics is simply richer people in the richer countries selfishly worrying about their own health. No one had thought about how global poverty creates a perfect medium to spread the disease.

Meaning, we're only worried about whether it will show up on our shores.

The sudden concern about avian flu is because Americans are finally realizing that it is a disease that won't respect borders or the barriers that separate the lives of the rich from the poor. According to estimates by the Bush administration, up to 2 million or more Americans could die of avian flu. And Americans, of course, have been left naked and largely unprotected by the brilliant policies of this administration, which, for example, immediately after its election put "abstinence education" on a much higher priority than influenza -- despite the fact that influenza, even in its normal, seasonal form, kills 35,000 or 40,000 Americans every year, a disproportionate number of those being elderly African-American people.

After September 11th, the defense agenda also got sidetracked by a lot of protection against biological weapons that are a much more distant danger than an avian flu pandemic.

When the administration decided that biowarfare was the great priority, they spent billions protecting us from Ebola fever and anthrax and smallpox. That was partly because of Washington's new emphasis on bioterrorism and the idea that Saddam Hussein had bioweapons, all of which was part of the pretext for invading Iraq. It was only late in the day that the administration suddenly embraced what the World Health Organization and others have been saying since the avian flu first leapt from birds to humans in 1997 in Hong Kong -- that this virus represents a real risk of being as deadly as the 1918 pandemic.

Which was extremely deadly.

It was the most single deadly event in human history, killing somewhere between 40 and 100 million people.

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