In a pair of articles in New Scientist, Debora MacKenzie links the swine flu virus now spreading across the globe to large-scale pork-raising operations in the United States.
In the first article, titled “Swine flu: the predictable pandemic?,” MacKenzie writes that the “virus has been a serious pandemic threat for years, New Scientist can reveal—but research into its potential has been neglected compared with other kinds of flu.” She writes that the strain now in the headlines has its origins in an earlier outbreak in the United States a decade ago:
This type of virus emerged in the U.S. in 1998 and has since become endemic on hog farms across North America. Equipped with a suite of pig, bird and human genes, it was also evolving rapidly.
Which, if true, also means that US officials shouldn’t have been so deferential to the pork industry in agreeing to no longer call it “swine flu.”
But it’s still edgy and hip to write about bacon whenever you’re out of ideas for the Slog or the Food section, right?
Time to start mandatory inspections of pig farms in the US for pollution runoffs and other non-sanitary conditions …
“this type of virus” originated pre-1918. H1N1.
…just reaping more dividends from the Bush era of deregulating, defunding and debasing America for the sake of Wall Street gamblers, war profiteers and “banksters.”
So, where do these morons get their food, air and water?
Oops!
Thank you for this post, Erica. Sorry for getting on your case for the chicken recipe this morning.
Eliminating the cow, pig, and chicken industries will solve almost all of our food-bourne environmental and health issues.
Spring Breaker Flu sounds better.
Right Flu, Wrong Swine
http://www.racewire.org/archives/2009/04…
@5: How are you going to provide nutrients to poorer nations who don’t have access to a healthy range of vegetables and fruits or vitamins? What about poorer communities in the United States?
There’s a reason vegetarianism is only widespread in richer developed nations and smaller compact communities with access to a variety of crops. Your side often fails to advocate for anything more than the complete end of all food herds and the end of breeding food animals.
Oh, and you ignore cultures that subsist primarily on meat having life expectancies longer than most others, like certain plains tribes.
But whatever alleviates the crushing guilt you feel for being a terrible and hateful human being living on stolen land.
@5 – Since getting rid of entire industries is not going to happen, do you have any realistic ideas?
Wait a minute – the virus is “evolving”? Maybe it was just intelligently designed that way! Let’s hear both sides of the argument!
Look, waves of meat-borne disease are no reason to stop eating cheap meat two or three times a day.
Growing meat – any kind of meat – on a scale necessary to satisfy the demands of millions of people is unsustainable – and as events are unfolding, we’ll find that it is also dangerous.
This isn’t a “meat is murder” message, but rather a wake up call to the American and international food industries.
In the half century or so that I’ve been alive, I’ve been able to tell a difference in the way beef and pork smells when it cooks, and I’ve seen the fat that a roasted chicken renders doubled or tripled. It’s a nasty, nasty industry, people – and even if you can’t agree that it’s a cruel industry, you have to admit that it’s a nasty one.
Baconcat #7, India is one of the poorest countries in the world, and 40% of the population is completely vegetarian. They have practically no pig or cow corpse industry.
There is vast data showing people who do not consume pig carcasses live longer than those who do. I am not discussing plains tribes, that is a separate issue. I am talking about America and other industrialized nations, which are the causes of bird and pig flus.
Like I mentioned in another thread, people who eat animal carcasses have more vitamin deficiences than those who don’t.
#8, Stop eating carcasses. The industries will convert to plant-based food production, just like the lead paint industry changed, and the agent orange industry changed. Like I’ve said, the food Americans eat today bears little resemblance to food eaten a generation or two ago. In another generation or two, the corpse industry can be completely extinct in America and other industrialized nations.
What is the cause of your deficiences, Stop it now?
@12: Those who eat fish and those who consume few meat products have a longer life expectancy than those who are Vegan, eat lots of meat (baseline in the US) or are vegetarian. Moreover, the United States’ life expectancy is 10 years longer than India’s. Hm.
And when you say you aren’t going to talk about plains tribes, why is that, exactly? I have relatives who are in their late 90s who subsist primarily on meat, one of whom drinks only two glasses of V8 a day for veg reqs and has several heaping helpings of de-fatted and drained boiled beef or chicken every day.
Listen, you aren’t going to drag people over to your side if you paint their side as undesireable and evil, you have to paint your own as the one to want. And if eating only plants makes you a douche, then perhaps it’s easy to determine why you’re having a hard time getting people to see the light?
Oh, and vegetarian products are often expensive and sometimes disgusting.
#14, India is incredibly poor, of course they live shorter than Americans.
I’m not discussing plains tribes because they hunt. You don’t hunt your bacon. If you want to hunt herds of wild pigs for your bacon, go ahead. You probably won’t hurt anyone but yourself.
You eat plenty of vegetarian products. You know, fruits, vegetables, breads, grains, beans, soups, salads — pretty much everything in restaurants and supermarkets except pig, bird, and cow corpses? Everything in the American diet is vegetarian except those 3 things. (Not counting fish, because fish is a much different issue.)
Eat all the fish you want, I just want you to stop eating pig, bird, and cow corpses because it is hurting me, hurting other innocent adults, hurting innocent children, and destroying the environment.
@15: My great-grandmother doesn’t hunt for her food, nor does her cousin. I don’t hunt, nor does my brother or my cousins or sister or aunt or uncles.
Myself, since I don’t eat much meat at all, why would I hunt? Leaning mostly toward small-farm poultry and fish a couple of times a week, I don’t see the need to grab my bow and arrow and go a-huntin’, although I’m pretty proficient at hitting little painted circles.
Listen, your solutions are only part of a larger fabric. The only way you can help personally is by jumping off a bridge with a few hundred million of your friends and associates. Gradual changes and adaptations are what keep us alive, and unless eating bacon or a slice of ham is giving you swine flu directly, it’s not going to keep people from eating meat.
Sorry to burst your naive little bubble.
My solution — for people to stop eating harvested corpses — is the ONLY solution to prevent future bird and pig flu pandemics, amongst many other social ills.
I don’t care about fish, I don’t care about hunting wild animals (assuming they aren’t endangered), I don’t care what your ancestors did. I only want you to stop eating bacon or ham or other products made from pig and bird and cow corpses, because it is giving me and other innocent people pig flu and other diseases.
actually, H1N1 variant A. So JZ is right @3.
My solution is for zombies to only eat vegetarians.
STOP IT NOW: Sorry, not going to happen. I have yet to meet a male vegetarian with a hot, buff worked out body. Meat is necessary to look the way I want to look. And I want to get laid.
Besides, things like mass-produced processed grains, high fructose corn syrup, soya isolate, etc are just as fake (if not more) to our bodies having only been “invented” very recently. It’s grass fed organic meat for me, I was sick constantly when I ate a carbohydrate diet of breads, pastas, and gives-men-bitch-tits soy.
You haven’t answered the question, Stop it now: WHY should we do what YOU want? You say I’m hurting you? Good. I WANT to hurt you.
Why are fish “corpses” less disgusting, Stop It Now (other than I’m beginning to suspect you don’t want to have to give up your sushi)? What have fish done to be less deserving of your self satisfied and rather dubious brand of compassion? It’s not like fishing isn’t environmentally destructive. Fish farms also have pretty horrific conditions, and can also be bad for the environement, and wild fishing can wreck havoc on an ecosystem. For that matter, so can commercial produce forming, what with the fertilizers and the pesticides and the hey hey hey.
If Deborah Mackenzie is so fucking sure, why is there a question mark at the end of the title to her article? Does the author of that piece have any credentials of her own, or is she just an intrepid reporter with ECB-esque fact-checking skillz?
Yeah, yeah, meat eaters cause all the worlds ills.
Oh, wait, if you’re using a computer, you are using electric, and causing global warming from coal burning power plants. Not only are you responsible for all respiratory illnesses from coal smoke, you also killed all of the victims of Katrina. What about all the poor coal miners you’re putting in danger!!!! And don’t get me started on the nuclear waste you’ve helped to produce.