Time for the Mainstream Media to Face the Factory Farm-Swine Flu Link

"Since last spring and the onset of the 2009 pandemic H1N1 influenza outbreak in humans, USDA has consistently asked that the media stop calling this "novel" pandemic virus "swine flu." By continuing to mislabel the 2009 pandemic H1N1 influenza...

November 10, 2009 | Source: Grist | by Tom Philpott

Novelist-turned-anti-meat-pamphleteer Jonathan Safran Foer made a stark claim about swine flu on The Ellen DeGeneres Show recently:

This swine flu that’s now an epidemic, they’ve been able to trace it back to a farm in North Carolina  A hog farm. Nobody knows this. Nobody talks about it. We’ve been told this lie that it came from Mexico.

Well, the situation is even worse than Foer suggests. Authorities aren’t actually saying the novel strain of swine flu “came from Mexico.” That would be uncomfortable, because it first cropped up there a few miles from vast hog operations run by U.S. pork giant Smithfield.

But they are insisting that “pork is safe”-and doing little or nothing to monitor hog confinements for evidence of infection.

For years before the current outbreak, scientists openly worried that CAFOs (concentrated animal feedlot operations) provided excellent arenas for the generation and spread of dangerous new flu varieties.

Yet another bit of evidence on this score crossed my desk this week: a “News Focus” piece that ran in Science back in 2003 called “Chasing the Fickle Swine Flu.” (PDF) It’s jumping-off point is the very incident Foer pointed to on Ellen-the outbreak of a novel strain of flu, genetically related to the current strain, on a North Carolina farm in 1998. The opening is worth quoting at length:

One of the first signs of trouble was a barking cough that resounded through a North Carolina farm in August 1998.  Every pig in an operation of 2400 animals  sickened, with symptoms similar to those caused by the human flu: high fever, poor appetite, and lethargy. Pregnant sows were hit hardest, and almost 10% aborted  their litters, says veterinary virologist Gene Erickson of the Rollins Animal Disease Diagnostic Laboratory in Raleigh. Many piglets that survived in utero were later born small and weak, and some 50 sows died.