Georgia’s Department of Agriculture on January 17 announced a suspension of all poultry exhibitions, shows, swaps, meets and sales due to the detection of a case of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza at a commercial poultry producer. A month earlier, California Governor Gavin Newsom declared a State of Emergency to “streamline and expedite the state’s response to Avian influenza A (H5N1),“ or bird flu, in the Golden State.
In Georgia, bird flu infected commercial poultry. Bird flu infected dairy cows on farms in Southern California.
People began to be infected with bird flu from exposures to animals with the virus in April 2024, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Detection of bird flu in dairy cattle in Kansas and Texas occurred in March 2024.
Bird flu is an airborne respiratory virus. Animal-to-animal transmission of the virus can spread easily, less so animal-to-human contagion.
“What is CDC on the lookout for? Indication that that virus may have broad dissemination among humans within specific populations or to the general population, or increasing numbers of people who are becoming infected without clear exposure to infected animals.”
Labor is a common thread in the spread of bird flu. Economically speaking, immigrant workers, with and without authorization, play a central role in agriculture.
Farm workers are in the language of the covid pandemic, “essential workers.” Their employment is essential to everybody else eating.
Against this emerging threat to public health, President Donald J. Trump signed an executive order to withdraw the U.S. from the World Health Organization on January 20. This executive order, one in a shower of them on Inauguration Day, came amid his promise to make America great once more.
National greatness is in the president’s words a unifying goal for Americans. Meanwhile, it is hard to miss that the president’s financial backers are the wealthiest men on the planet, namely Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, oligarchs of Big Tech.
This example of campaign donors tied to politicians is nothing new. The newness, perhaps, is that the interests of the president’s billionaire backers and his pledge to protect the U.S. populace from a so-called immigrant invasion, for instance, is a unity of opposites, revealing their connectedness, the existence of one in reliance with the other.
Fascism, the wedding of big business with the capitalist state, ties together the financial elite and their shock troops. They come from the working class. This is a class compromise.
The leader employs national unity as a class unifying concept. He will, via his abilities and capacities as an influential politician, restore a past without diversity, equity and inclusion, trans people, unauthorized immigrants and “wokeness.”
In the meantime, germs and viruses such as bird flu don’t recognize national borders, according to Lawrence Gostin, law professor and director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Center at Georgetown University. The U.S. is a part of—not apart from—a global capitalist system.
Production, distribution and consumption of goods and services worldwide is the normal operation of the system. National exports and imports flow across the planet daily.
Production that begins in one country travels abroad. China’s emergence as a global economic powerhouse of exports such as Apple, Inc. products is a case in point.
An America first slogan repeated daily fails to change the global production, distribution and consumption system in a way that benefits the American working class. Accordingly, a globally coordinated campaign of disease detection and eradication is a comprehensive approach to improving the public health of the U.S. populace versus one that is piecemeal.
“Outside the United States, more than 950 cases of H5N1 bird flu have been reported to the World Health Organization;” according to the CDC, “about half of those have resulted in death.” There have been 66 confirmed bird flu cases in humans stateside since 2024.
Wait. The president just withdrew the U.S. from the WHO.