Commentary By Ron Beasley
As BJ reported below swine flu seems to spreading rapidly. What's not spreading rapidly is that the outbreak may have been traced back to a Smithfield Foods industrial hog factory in Perote, Mexico.
On Friday, the U.S. disease-tracking blog Biosurveillance published a timeline of the outbreak containing this nugget, dated April 6 (major tip of the hat to Paula Hay, who alerted me to the Smithfield link on the Comfood listserv and has written about it on her blog, Peak Oil Entrepreneur):
Residents [of Perote] believed the outbreak had been caused by contamination from pig breeding farms located in the area. They believed that the farms, operated by Granjas Carroll, polluted the atmosphere and local water bodies, which in turn led to the disease outbreak. According to residents, the company denied responsibility for the outbreak and attributed the cases to �flu.� However, a municipal health official stated that preliminary investigations indicated that the disease vector was a type of fly that reproduces in pig waste and that the outbreak was linked to the pig farms. It was unclear whether health officials had identified a suspected pathogen responsible for this outbreak.
From what I can tell, the possible link to Smithfield has not been reported in the U.S. press. Searches of Google News and the websites of the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal all came up empty. The link is being made in the Mexican media, however. �Granjas Carroll, causa de epidemia en La Gloria,� declared a headline in the Vera Cruz-based paper La Marcha. No need to translate that, except to point out that La Gloria is the village where the outbreak seems to have started.
Now this is not really a surprise. Pollution from industrial hog farms goes virtually unregulated in spite of the fact that they produce more (and more toxic) waste than a large city. And we are talking both solid waste, liquid waste and air pollution. This article from Rolling Stone has all the details.
Ron, I love your work, but this is crazy. Hog waste and flies cannot contribute to a flu outbreak. Full stop. Waste lagoons cause flu-like symptoms because of intense concentrations of hazardous chemicals like ammonia, but they do not cause the flu. Flies are not and never will be influenza vectors.
ReplyDeleteThe vector of this disease is already known. It is an H1N1 influenza virus that somehow, unfortunately, picked up genetic material from human, avian and swine strains of flu. It almost certainly came from a farm where people live and work intimately with their animals, because that is where the different strains of flu have an opportunity to meet and recombine DNA. I would normally consider a feedlot as one option, but the avian contribution suggests a mixed farm. Unlike the US, those still happen in Mexico.
I think that vast environmental damage and antibiotic resistant E coli and staph infections are enough reason to knock feedlots without adding in vague suggestions about pandemic flu.
"flies cannot contribute to a flu outbreak"
ReplyDeleteTell that to the birds:
http://www.canadianpoultrymag.com/content/view/1187/67/
Tim
ReplyDeleteI recognize that thisis much closer to your area of expertise than mine but I notice that others are not so quick to dismiss the posibility. The virus could have been brought into the hog factory from the outside where due to the conditions it would have spread rapidly. In addition buerman's link above,
Flies and Avian Influenza
would indicate that flies can and have been a vector.
I can't see the relevance of "factory" farming to the issue of the origin of this virus. Particularly the part about the flies. In birds influenza is an intestinal disease and feces can cause the widespread dissemination of the virus. This is not true in swine or humans where the virus principally attacks the respiratory tract. In any event factory farming is less likely to be the point of inter-species transmission than a conventional farm.
ReplyDelete