Brandon Keim explores the history of the H5N1 virus, tracing its roots from poultry farms in Guangdong, China, to its global spread and potential threats to human health. As the story unfolds, it reveals the interplay between agricultural practices and the evolution of the virus and asks questions about how our food choices may be shaping the future of infectious diseases.
Media coverage of H5N1 captures this urgency but tends to focus on the day-by-day—the latest “depopulation,” as mass exterminations at poultry facilities are known, the latest sick cows or dead cats, the latest mutations. Lost in the furor is a clear sense of where H5N1, and the class of influenzas to which it belongs, comes from: the evolutionary crucible of intensive animal production.