Pork Council: Nein on 'swine'

Follow this link to a lengthy article on factory farming and mutation patterns of viruses.

Since its identification during the Great Depression, H1N1 swine flu had only drifted slightly from its original genome. Then in 1998 a highly pathogenic strain began to decimate sows on a farm in North Carolina and new, more virulent versions began to appear almost yearly, including a variant of H1N1 that contained the internal genes of H3N2 (the other type-A flu circulating among humans).

Researchers interviewed by Science worried that one of these hybrids might become a human flu (both the 1957 and 1968 pandemics are believed to have originated from the mixing of bird and human viruses inside pigs), and urged the creation of an official surveillance system for swine flu: an admonition, of course, that went unheeded in a Washington prepared to throw away billions on bioterrorism fantasies.

But what caused this acceleration of swine flu evolution? Virologists have long believed that the intensive agricultural system of southern China is the principal engine of influenza mutation: both seasonal "drift" and episodic genomic "shift." But the corporate industrialisation of livestock production has broken China's natural monopoly on influenza evolution. Animal husbandry in recent decades has been transformed into something that more closely resembles the petrochemical industry than the happy family farm depicted in school readers.

In 1965, for instance, there were 53m US hogs on more than 1m farms; today, 65m hogs are concentrated in 65,000 facilities. This has been a transition from old-fashioned pig pens to vast excremental hells, containing tens of thousands of animals with weakened immune systems suffocating in heat and manure while exchanging pathogens at blinding velocity with their fellow inmates.

Last year a commission convened by the Pew Research Center issued a report on "industrial farm animal production" that underscored the acute danger that "the continual cycling of viruses … in large herds or flocks [will] increase opportunities for the generation of novel virus through mutation or recombinant events that could result in more efficient human to human transmission." The commission also warned that promiscuous antibiotic use in hog factories (cheaper than humane environments) was sponsoring the rise of resistant staph infections, while sewage spills were producing outbreaks of E coli and pfiesteria (the protozoan that has killed 1bn fish in Carolina estuaries and made ill dozens of fishermen).

Any amelioration of this new pathogen ecology would have to confront the monstrous power of livestock conglomerates such as Smithfield Farms (pork and beef) and Tyson (chickens). The commission reported systemic obstruction of their investigation by corporations, including blatant threats to withhold funding from cooperative researchers.

This is a highly globalised industry with global political clout. Just as Bangkok-based chicken giant Charoen Pokphand was able to suppress enquiries into its role in the spread of bird flu in southeast Asia, so it is likely that the forensic epidemiology of the swine flu outbreak will pound its head against the corporate stonewall of the pork industry.

No wonder Big Pork is scrambling and spinning. It's likely that their entire business model is at risk.

I wish a reporter with a camera would go to the epicenter in Mexico where the people are complaining and film the small town and the factory farms and show us what is happening in a country with probably little to no regulations.

Calling it the swine flu is a complete joke and creates an unwarranted hysteria. After all, it isn't a swine flu.

Pork Council - get a clue. Don't try to play Orwellian word games. It is SWINE flu and we will call it SWINE flu whether you like it or not. Bugger off!

Hope no one tells the poultry folks about chicken pox.

What else should we call it?
The Other White Flu?

Or pick your own combination from the list below. Just remember that if they're domesticated, they're swine & that CDC says it's a new influenza of swine origin.
http://www.cdc.gov/swineflu

Boar, Cob roller, Hog, Javelina, Oinker, Peccary, Pig, Piggy, Piglet, Porker, Razorback, Shoat, Sow, Warthog

It may have come from a cluster of Smithfield joint venture corporate hog manufacturing plants around La Gloria, Veracruz state Mexico. If such were the case, the appropriate colloquial name for it would be Mexican SPP Globalist Pig Flu.

It is patently absurd to call it anything else, The pig is the reservoir for this particular strain of virus, H1N1. What should the virologists call it? Elephant flu perhaps, because there are no elephant farmers in the Carolinas.

Is the H1N1 swine flu virus the same as human H1N1 viruses?
No. The H1N1 swine flu viruses are antigenically very different from human H1N1 viruses and, therefore, vaccines for human seasonal flu would not provide protection from H1N1 swine flu viruses.

It is the swine flu... It is what it is.

Maybe the pork council could use their old slogan from several years back. "Saying it doesn't make it so". Poor babies.