The enirety of Dr. Michael Gregor's excellent book Bird Flu: A Virus of Our Own Hatching (with a forward by Dr. Kennedy Shortridge, the physician who "discovered" H5N1 in Asia) is available online. It's an easy read and exhaustively referenced. 

Meanwhile, have you been following the honeybee crisis? Colony Collapse Disorder? The long and short of it is this: whole honeybee colonies are simply dying off by the millions in the US, Germany, and elsewhere, and no one knows why. The bees leave the hive and....just don't come back. Or a few may be left behind in the hive. Bee rapture.

This started happening regionally a few years ago - we were having a hell of a time sourcing organic honey for an area co-op's bakery about 6 years ago and had to source it out of Argentina - but now it's a national and global crisis. And I do mean crisis. I was talking to a buyer of almonds out east whose prices are already fairly high because of shortages in California and he said the price was about to double because of Colony Collapse Disorder. The almond trees are simply not getting pollinated.

Anyway, Spiegel Online has a compelling, potential explanation of the disorder in Are GM crops Killing Bees?. It might sound hysterical - are genetically modified monsters killing your children?? -- but the GMO in question is called Bt, a mildly toxic bacterium whose genes have been knitted into the DNA of many a cash crop, making the individual plant a veritable "pesticide in every bite." Harmless to humans (I guess), the gene appears in potatoes, corn, cotton, etc, and controls predator pests that eat the crop's tissues. 

But maybe not just predator pests. Insecticides are insecticides, after all.

The supposition of this German study is that bees are getting dosed with Bt from pollen and individual bees are suffering something akin to an apiary immune collapse. Eleven years after its introduction, Bt is entrenched now - it's so deep in our conventional ag practices it's like a tractor or a subsidy (roughly twenty percent of US corn is genetically engineered with the Bt gene).  The problem with many of the other explanations of CCD is that they don't really take in the scope necessary to affect bees across the US - and in other countries (Germany). The Bt theory addresses that. 

Of course, it's major shortcoming is that CCD is no doubt occuring in regions where Bt is not planted. And certainly CCD is a phenomenon that has been occuring on much a smaller scale predating the introduction of Bt. Plus, this is just one study. Hardly definitive.

But with a syndrome that otherwise has few explanations, many feel that it would be fascinating to see this theory examined further.