swine flu and pork farms

cross posted from Raven’s Eye

h/t Angry Black Woman

excerpted from The Guardian

Early today the US owner of an industrial pig production facility around 12 miles from La Gloria said it had found no clinical signs or symptoms of swine flu in its herd or Mexican employees. The world’s biggest pig meat producer, Virginia-based Smithfield, said it is co-operating with the Mexican authorities’ attempts to locate the possible source of the outbreak and will submit samples from its herds at its Granjas Carroll subsidiary to the University of Mexico for tests.

“Based on available recent information, Smithfield has no reason to believe that the virus is in any way connected to its operations in Mexico,” it said in a statement. “The company also noted that its joint ventures in Mexico routinely administer influenza virus vaccination to their swine herds and conduct monthly tests for the presence of swine influenza.”

The statement came after Mexico’s national public health authority, the Mexican social security institute, raised concerns that waste from the Granjas Carrol facility may be responsible for the outbreak of illness, according to local media.

“According to state agents of the Mexican social security institute, the vector of this outbreak are the clouds of flies that come out of the hog barns, and the waste lagoons into which the Mexican-US company spews tons of excrement,” reported Mexico City newspaper La Jornada. Swine flu can be caught through contact with infected animals, but it is unclear if contact with flies or excrement has the same effect.

oh say what? Maybe just maybe this swine flu is due to factory farming? From a US factory farming company? A US company that regularly gives flu vaccines to pigs? So maybe swine flu is so potent because its a mutated viral form that evolved able to survive the flu vaccine administered to the herd? But of course the Guardian article does not show us a picture of the CEO of Smithfield but of a lil Mexican boy from Veracruz. Sigh.

About 60% of the village were ill and we asked them what it was and they said it was a severe and atypical cold. We talked about influenza and they said that was impossible, that influenza had been eradicated from Mexico.

The healthworker in me wants to rant about the overuse of vaccines in all animals including humans. And the way that we keep thinking that we can beat biology and evolution by making drugs and vaccines that kill off one species without the acknowledgement that what we are really doing is creating the space for another species (like swine flu) to flourish. And we can’t control which species will evolve into dominance. We can’t.

Smithfield, which is led by pork baron Joseph W Luter III, has previously been fined for environmental damage in the US. In October 2000 the supreme court upheld a $12.6m (£8.6m) fine levied by the US environmental protection agency which found that the company had violated its pollution permits in the Pagan River in Virginia which runs towards Chesapeake Bay. The company faced accusations that faecal and other bodily waste from slaughtered pigs had been dumped directly into the river since the 1970s .

And I want to rant about factory farming. And how we all know that that is not how we should treat sentient beings in this universe, caged, penned, mutilated, blind, packed together on top of each other, brutalized, and then killed. Guess what its not good for the pigs, its not good for the humans who have to work with the pigs, its not good for the environment and natural world and neighborhoods and children and elders and pregnant women and anyone who live near the pigs or the humans who have to work with the pigs. Listen I am not a hard core vegan who thinks it is categorically morally wrong to kill another sentient being. I have loved too many living beings and killed them: lemon basil plants and strawberries and olives. I believe that plants are just as valuable as animals in this universe. They suffer. They feel pain and pleasure. I have seen plants cry and survive and ask to be killed. But the way that we treat animals like a product in this culture is horrifying for everyone concerned. The health worker in me is horrified at how we refuse to take care of each other. That our individualistic isolationist culture thinks that we can treat millions of animals like this and it wont affect us, humans.

And I want to rant about that 4 year old lil boy in Veracruz. He is a survivor. And two babies died. And maybe it wasnt a flu that killed them. But something, someone, much more grotesque. Maybe I’ve spent too much time in a Muslim-dominant country but the title, pork baron, just sounds sinister.