The Long View

A couple of smart pieces this morning on the swine flu outbreak: The first is a NYT op-ed by John Barry, whose definitive and eminently readable account of the 1918 pandemic was published in 2004. He traces the arc these new influenza viruses seem to take based on our experience with past outbreaks. The second is a provocative, forward-leaning column by Mike Davis in The Guardian that points the finger at industrial meat production as, if not the source of this particular strain of flu, a fertile petri dish for future swine flu recombinations.