Complexity is a funny thing. Last year, I wrote about its scarier implications in the event of a deadly pandemic (much deadlier, please note, than the flu pandemic now under way), and, taking things a bit further, for what might make civilisation collapse. Both investigations found that, the more complex our social systems, the more likely that: a. you can't predict what will happen when you change even a seemingly small bit of it; and b. what does happen may hurt. Take Egyptian pigs. Pigs are forbidden meat for Muslims, so there is no commercial pig industry in Egypt. But an often repressed minority of Coptic Christians does raise them. When swine flu started spreading globally last spring, the Egyptian government decided to slaughter all the Copts' pigs, tens of thousands of them. This made little epidemiological sense: the pandemic virus originated in pigs, but by then it was already a disease you get from people, not pigs. Just an excuse for someone to curry electoral favour by Copt-bashing, some concluded. Verdict: killing pigs bad.
But then, maybe getting pigs out of Egypt wasn't such a bad idea. If the H1N1 swine flu virus hybridises with the H5N1 bird flu virus, it could spawn one that spreads like swine flu and kills like bird flu - not a nice thought. Egypt has plenty of H5N1 in birds and a steady trickle of cases in people, including several at the time of the pig slaughter: in total 27 Egyptians have died of it. There has already been a false alarm about swine and bird flu co-infection in Egyptians.
The two may also co-infect pigs and hybridise there. There is H5N1 bird flu in Chinese and Indonesian pigs, and lots in Egyptian chickens, so it seems unlikely that the Copts' scavenging, urban swine would be free of it. H5N1 has shown little inclination to hybridise with human flu in pigs so far, but the pandemic swine flu virus, which seems right at home in pigs, may be less picky. Verdict: killing pigs good.
Or maybe not. The Copts' pigs were the main system for getting rid of food waste in Egypt's crowded, chaotic cities. Now it is piling up and rotting. And with Egypt keeping schools closed until October to delay the pandemic, there are even more kids than usual playing in the stuff. Pandemic or no pandemic, this cannot be a good thing disease-wise. Verdict: who can tell by this point?
This reminds me of what happened when, for reasons of good husbandry, Indian farmers started giving their ailing cattle the painkiller diclofenac. Some animals died, and as always in India, the big griffon vultures ate the remains, diclofenac and all. Now the vultures have almost entirely disappeared from India. Turns out diclofenac destroys their kidneys. Who knew? Now animal remains feed packs of feral dogs instead, raising the risk of rabies, a horrible death for thousands every year, mainly children.
