Nostradamus predicted Farmtown will usher in the next great plague.

OK, so maybe those were not his exact words, I believe the strict translation says that “Fram Owtn” will usher in the next “black death“. Scholars for years have been trying to decipher what Nostradamus was referring to when he spelled out “Fram Owtn,“ but since the massive explosion of Facebook, the answer has become abundantly clear. By just slightly shifting the letters we can see that Farm Town will be the doom of us all….I mean, how can we deny the for sight of the man who predicted Hisler and the raise of a new nation to the West. Sadly, my favorite 16th century seer failed to give any more details into how the plague would come to be, but, after playing Farm Town, I think I have deciphered how.

For those of you that do not know, Farm Town is a virtual farming community that one can play while logged into Facebook. It teaches the WiFi generation the basics of farm management and agriculture, making its players tend to crops, raise livestock, build barns and decorate their farms in their own personal style so the neighbors will stop by and be jealous. While on the surface, this game sounds great, like the classic of my generation, the Oregon Trail, where thousands of children learned how to repair wagons and fend off typhoid by simply pressing the return key, the writers of the program left out a key basic farming tenant that might lead to the death of us all. Now, I‘m not sure if the omission of this detail was an oversight, or a vicious plot, but nonetheless, our youth are learning a farming technique that will wipe the human race from the earth.

What part of the game could possible lead to the greatest catastrophe since the extinction of the dinosaurs, you ask? Well the answer is simple, the raising of large numbers of pigs and chickens on the same farm. Sound silly? Think I’m nuts? Asking yourself how on earth raising two farm animals could be the end of days? Well its simple, its called reassortment, and its something that has happened before, and can be prevented from happening again.

Now I know some of you might be thinking, “what on earth is reassortment and what does it have to do with the next great pandemic?” Well, with out getting too technical, reassortment is a process that some viruses can use to swap out parts of their genomes with that of closely related viruses. Its sort of like a game of virus pick up sticks. Two closely related viruses infect the same cell, replicate their segmented genomes and, when it comes time to pack up new viruses, they grab a few pieces from their genome but also grab a few pieces from their roommate‘s. The end product is a Frankensteinian virus with genome segments from both the parents. Most the time, the consequences of this happening in the natural world are not readily apparent, and if I had to guess, often results in viruses that are unable to replicate on their own. However, sometimes reassortment can generate a hybrid virus that gains growth advantages compared to either of its parents (and isn’t that every parents goal, for their children to go beyond what they ever achieved). It is when this happens that scientists start to get worried, because some believe that this has happened before, resulting in very dire consequences.

Flash back to 1917. The Great War is in full swing and hundreds of thousands of young men are packed into small quarters…bunkers, trenches, barracks, etc. While these young men were ready to give their lives to fight for their country, little did they know that the biggest killer in WWI would not be the battlefield, but rather, would be the Flu. The 1918 Flu would take the lives of 50 million people before it had run its course. The source of this new strain of Flu has been the subject of much debate, but one theory is that the virus was a new strain generated by reassortment of three different flu viruses; one from swine, one from chickens and one from man. Remember, during WWI there were no such things as refrigerators and freezers and so fresh food required the transport of livestock along with the troops. It is believed that the density of pigs, chickens and people on army bases was at a critical mass, allowing for the different influenza strains to intermingle, giving birth to a new strain that no one had ever seen and resulting in the deaths of millions of people.

This concern over farming birds and pigs in the same area is still alive today. Remember the massive panic over “Avian” flu a few years ago? Again, the fear for scientists is the close association of birds with swine. Now, the lesson is simple, don’t cultivate the two together, which, is done in most of the industrialized nations. Its much more difficult to convince farmers in developing nations to do the same and is why, most efforts to monitor Flu reassortment focuses on regions of the world that is just beginning mass production of farm animals. As for Farm Town (or Farmville, or FarmStory), for those of you who play, or have kids that play, I’d encourage you to not raise chickens and pigs on your farm I’m thinking of starting a petition to get the writers of Farm Town to introduce a new calamity into the game allowing for a new pandemic flu if people put the pigs in the same pen as the chickens….for some reason I don’t think they will go for it.