The social amplification of disaster: Policy implications for agroecological pandemics

It is well understood that a vast spectrum of RNA virus types is undergoing rapid genetic reassortment and evolution in large-scale animal monoculture facilities, increasingly likely to entrain newer pathogens from neoliberally 'developing' areas to produce a massively fatal human pandemic that will overwhelm even the best possible health system responses. In such a pandemic -- that a mathematical model suggests can penetrate far more deeply than the 1918 event -- the USA and the PRC, which are parallel in animal monoculture structures, could lose a significant fraction of their populations to direct disease. Here, we examine powerful but less understood mechanisms of social amplification that can greatly raise the ultimate loss of life, roughly similar to the impact of the 'stabbed in the back' myth that emerged in Germany after WW I. It is obvious that effective programs to contain these threats must include -- or even begin with -- establishment of a close collaboration between interests in the USA and the PRC, where most large-scale animal monoculture is either located or from which it is managed.