The Monster at Our Door

The MacArthur Fellow and author of Dead Cities presents a terrifying forecast of a new global threat—and “its argument is irrefutable” (The Independent).

Hailed by The Nation as a “master of disaster prose,” author and activist Mike Davis addresses the imminent catastrophe of Avian influenza. In 1918, a pandemic strain of influenza killed at least forty million people in three months. Now, leading researchers believe, another global outbreak is all but inevitable.

A virus of astonishing lethality, known as H5N1, has become entrenched in the poultry and wild bird populations of East Asia. It kills two out of every three people it infects. The World Health Organization warns that it is on the verge of mutating into a super-contagious pandemic form that could visit several billion homes within two years.

In this urgent and alarming book, Mike Davis reconstructs the scientific and political history of a viral apocalypse in the making, exposing the central roles of agribusiness and the fast-food industries, abetted by corrupt governments, in creating the ecological conditions for the emergence of this new plague.