As the evidence piles up that the current strain of swine flu did indeed originate in a Confined Animal Feeding Operation, AKA a factory farm (yesterday, the CDC confirmed that it came from a strain that was first identified in a North Carolina factory farm) Smithfield is doing damage control—by blaming the media. From Grist:

In a letter to employees, [CEO C. Larry] Pope wrote that the results of those independent laboratory tests will be available and made public in a few days.

He issued the letter, meant to assure employees that Smithfield is taking steps to ensure their safety and that of the company’s pig herds, after international media reports indicated a link between the outbreak and a jointly owned hog farm in Veracruz. Veracruz is located near La Gloria, home to a little boy some believe to be the original H1N1 case.

“Unfortunately, the media and bloggers have jumped to conclusions based more on fear than fact and have sensationalized a serious illness,” Pope wrote.

Meanwhile, Sustainable Table policy analyst Rebecca Weiss writes about factory farms’ long history of breeding viruses.

It’s well-established that hogs are highly susceptible to contracting viruses from other mammals and from birds. This makes them ideal vessels for breeding new virus strains, which can then be spread by the hogs, their waste, or the workers who come in contact with either.

None of this is news; it’s been known since at least the early 20th century, when tens of millions of people died from swine flu in the span of just two years. For years, in fact, officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have been wondering just when a new pandemic would arise. […]

Concentrated feeding operations – massive facilities where thousands of animals are closely confined – are ideal breeding grounds for new infectious agents. While workers at these huge hog-breeding operations are supposed to wear sterilized clothing to minimize the spread of disease, that hasn’t diminished their exposure, judging by hog workers’ elevated antibody levels and “self-reported influenza-like illness,” according to the CDC. In fact, the threat is so well-known that, in 2004, the owner of a Nebraska factory farm told a reporter he seldom visits his own facility due to “bio-security” concerns.

The bottom line is: Our desire for cheap meat—our refusal to pay for quality—has helped produce the perfect breeding grounds for disease. We shouldn’t be surprised that confined spaces filled with thousands of animals with compromised immune systems are breeding grounds for disease. The real surprise should be that it hasn’t happened sooner.

47 replies on “Of Course It Came from a Factory Farm”

  1. This is why I don’t eat pork(aside from being made of it), most beef and a lot of poultry.

    Mmmmm, forced feeding, no fresh water. Yum yum!

  4. What of my taco truck style pork tacos and my Italian pulled pork sandwiches?!

    Maybe if my real wages rose the same way executive salaries do, I could afford pork shoulder for more than .99 $/lbs at QFC… (on sale this weekend!)

  6. Thanks Erica for the great post. I blame the media and bloggers as well, for perpetuating the myth that pig, cow, and bird corpses aren’t destructive to humankind. The entire pig flu media attention should be focused on how to prevent future outbreaks (people need to stop purchasing and consuming harvested carcasses).

    Thanks Baconcat for being a reasonable citizen, but if you must continue to eat cow and bird bodies, please research your sources to ensure they are harvested from unconfined conditions similar to those in the wild — this is rare for cow harvesting, and almost nonexistent for pigs and birds. Hunting is always a more socially responsible option.

  8. Also– the second quote seems to hint (doesn’t say explicitly) that the 1918 flu was pig flu. That was common wisdom until genetic analysis was done about 2 years back. It’s now thought to have been bird flu.

    Though I don’t know if you can disprove that pigs were the vector by which it passed from bird to human…. just that the jump didn’t require recombination in pigs.

  9. This is a good post. But I wonder if “our refusal to pay for quality” is less of an influence on these practices than, say, non-existant regulations on factory farms. Prices would go up; demand would go down; circle of life, etc.

    Obviously I can’t speak for everyone, but if I had the option to pay a couple of dollars more per pound for more sustainably grown pork, I would do that (unless maybe I was unemployed and in dire need of some sort of protein other than beans and rice), and simply eat less pork. But how do we even know that what is marketed as “sustainable” actually IS, unless there are regulations?

  10. It’s protein-per-pound cheaper to eat ethically farmed animals in strict moderation than it is to subsist on a solely vegetarian diet. Nutritionally speaking, the mitigation required to reverse estrogen production and testosterone restriction on a strictly veg diet make it cost prohibitive.

    And any beef I eat is primarily ranch-raised, not “farm-grown”.

  11. New Scientist had another good piece today detailing exactly how closely the current virus is related to swine. It’s identical to known common swine viruses except that it has one pig bit swapped out for another pig bit. The human bird pig reassortment happened decades ago. The subsequent pig virus mutate in a host pig at some point. Pig pig pig. How is this anything BUT swine flu?

  12. It’s possible to take this argument pretty far: arguably, agriculture tout court is a public health nightmare. It supports large, static populations, which is necessarily is a breeding ground for disease. In some ways, factory farming could be argued to be safer, since fewer people come into contact with the animals. Which is not to say that a lot of factory farming practices are not absurdly stupid and dangerous (non-therapeutic antibiotic use in particular), but even without factory farming, this kind of thing would still happen fairly frequently.

  14. There is an arguement to be made that a well run factory system is actually less likely to result in a pandemic. You have less human-animal contact, a greater ability to monitor, and less exposure to the environment. Now our system is broken, but its not exactly like the old system of smaller family farms never lead to epidemics.

  15. I’m no apologist for factory farms, which I think are appalling and I would like to be banned so that I can buy good quality locally grown meat.

    However, saying that factory farms are better breeding grounds for flu viruses in hogs and therefore horrible is akin to saying that cities are breeding grounds for flu viruses in humans and are therefore horrible. It’s the proximity that’s the primary issue.

    And in this case, what Pope said isn’t unreasonable. As a matter of fact, the graf above his pointing the media makes exactly the kind of jump he’s referring to as does ECB’s headline.

    The real evil would be if there was some truth that he is hiding. Until we have more evidence and know exactly what’s going on, speculation is just that and should be labelled as such.

  17. “confined spaces filled with thousands of animals with compromised immune systems are breeding grounds for disease”

    This time next week, that may just describe Capitol Hill.

  18. Great post, ECB..

    There MUST be better ways to raise food animals, ways that aren’t prohibitively expensive (because I know that free-range organic meat is a choice, but it’s a choice few can afford regularly). My hope is that this event will kick-start us into coming up with those better ways, pronto.

    And, Stop It Now, we get your point, thank you. You would like for everyone on the planet to stop eating meat, period. Thank you, we understand that. That is your passionate wish, and you must know somewhere in your being that that will never occur. It is a much more effective strategy, and much more impactfully beneficial to the animals themselves, to talk to people about reducing the amount of meat they eat, and to choose meat from animals raised and processed in the healthiest way possible. I wish you well in your endeavours.

  19. And Seattle as a whole (yeah, I know there aren’t that many people in Capitol Hill alone)…

    Hooray for dense urban living…

  20. You left out another problem with CAFOs and bugs: the huge amounts of antibiotics the animals are stuffed with. It’s a worse problem with cows, which need the antibiotics not just because of the horrifying conditions — belly-deep in a mixture of shit and tallow for months on end — but because the food they eat can’t be digested properly, and as a result their stomach pH is too high to kill bacteria like e.coli. Solution? Pump ’em full of antibiotics, and when the bugs develop antibiotic-resistant strains, switch antibiotics, and pump up the volume. CAFOs are among other things factories for the development of antibiotic-resistant superbugs.

    Pigs are biologically able to eat anything, even garbage or shit, so I don’t think they have the same pH problem, but they sure do get the megadoses of antibiotics.

    I realize that flu is viral, not bacterial, but the conditions that make bacteria flourish are great for viruses, too, especially since viruses have magic intelligence to mutate into more-survivable forms — and animals with compromised immune systems make great incubators.

    I think the easiest way to regulate the industry to make these abuses impossible without requiring ridiculous amounts of paperwork or animal tracking is simply to ban the use of antibiotics, period. You’d see some horrific disease outbreaks at first, but producers would be forced to change the way they operate quickly if they wanted to stay in biz. Let simple economics work for you.

    See, SIN? THAT’S how you write a condemnation of industrial meat, not your childish bleatings.

    Now, I’m about ready for some bratwurst….

  22. “our refusal to pay for quality”

    Are you really that stupid? People can’t afford quality, thus we have no choice. If you want to eat meat (or considering prices these days anything at all) and you work for under 50 grand a year, well over 50% of the population, you don’t refuse to pay for higher quality meat because the shitty stuff is all you can afford. I understand it’s still the fact that we’re not buying high quality meat, but it’s not a refusal, it’s simply out of reach.

  23. We should decentralize and personalize our meat industry. It makes sense from a carbon-emissions perspective, it makes sense epidemiologically, it makes sense from an ethical perspective: if you aren’t willing to raise and kill it yourself, you really shouldn’t eat it.

    If people during World War II had Victory Gardens, we should have Freedom Goats.

  25. If this pathetic virus is the worst thing that comes from cheap meat, then throw another slab of bacon on the frying pan cause I’m going for seconds.

  27. @23, Oooh, Freedom Goats! Then you could even rent out the Freedom Goat to people who need to clear their yards of excess vegetation! Unintended bonus: fewer weed-whackers and lawn mowers starting up before 7 a.m. on a Saturday. Win-win-win.

  29. @22 it’s only out of reach if you feel the need to eat meat two or three times a day. Access to cheap meat has gotten us used to buying shit meat and eating it for breakfast, lunch and dinner – check the USDA’s research on it 40% more per capita consumption over the last 50 years.

    Sure, if you need to drink a handle of liquor a day, you can’t afford to be drinking ketel 1, but if you drink in moderation, you can afford the good stuff. So yeah, you do have a choice.

  32. #22 I disagree that you don’t have a choice except to buy cheap meat. You always have a choice.
    It depends if you are willing to consume crap in excessive amounts or quality food in smaller amounts.

  34. Fnarf, your “condemnation” is just business as usual. It doesn’t remotely solve the 18% of global warming emissions, bird or pig flu, e.coli, salmonella, ecosystem and habitat destruction, massive energy waste, etc. My solution — stop eating pig, cow, and bird corpses — solves all of them.

  35. @34
    Let me ask you, what do we do with all the animals alive right now awaiting slaughter. Do we kill them? Set them free? Any option that involves keeping them alive means at least another decade of the same practices we have now.

    Personally I think the costs of meat are worth it, though I do think we need to reform and reregulate our farming practices.

  37. Stop it now, someday, maybe soon, maybe not, some cute boy or girl is going to eat YOUR meat and you’re going to forget all about this “stop it now” business. I’ve seen a thousand like you. Someday you’re going to find yourself with a big salami sliding down your gullet, and maybe, just maybe, you’ll spare a thought for the righteous idealist you used to be. Back when you were twelve.

  38. Yawn Fnarf.

    #35, Corporations will stop breeding animals for their bodies once people like Fnarf die off and demand plummets (which will be much sooner than if they ate a healthy corpse-free diet). The animals alive right now will be dead in weeks or months once their bodies are large enough for harvesting. Like any industry, cow, pig, and bird carcasses are manufactured to meet demand.

  39. BTW, here is a quote from one of those naive young 12-year olds.

    “Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances for survival of life on earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.”

    —Albert Einstein

    He said this in 1930, when he was 51 years old, at a time when there were seemed to be a lot more threats to human health and survival of life on earth than in 2009.

  40. There is just no way Americans can keep eating meat the way they do now, but relying only on the mythical “small family farm.” We kill and eat billions of animals a year in this country, and it’s just not possible to slaughter that many animals lovingly and humanely.

  41. @39,

    So?

    There are few arguments more worthless than quotes. You might want to do a little research on the fallacy known as “appeal to authority”.

  42. @41, I agree. I have posted about a bazillion logical comments without using quotes. I was just responding to Fnarf’s assertion that I’m a naive 12-year old who doesn’t get laid. Any fallacies in that argument?

  43. All this talk about fallacies is making me regret that I told you can touch my monkey, Klaus.

    Your narrative has become tiresome.

    Now is the time on Sprockets vhen ve dance!

  45. @35, sgiffy. That’s what I keep asking whenever the subject comes up. It may be debatable, but people have been trained to think we’re here for a reason. So we also want to push that reason onto everything else. Animals don’t have to live/die for us anymore than the coral reefs in the seas have to be there for us. The problem is, do we want to make every animal a pet to keep around and to feed and care for? We’ve given some animals a reason to live-to keep us alive. Is that an evil thing to do? Should humans have been born&evolved more like cows and pigs and live a vegan life? I believe in evolution and that our ancestors ate animals to survive. There’s also the Noah’s Flood followers who say they got permission from their higher power to eat meat.
    If you’ve ever read a sex column(like Savage Love) you’ll know that all people need is to be given permission to do something they feel good doing already.

    The wolf shall dwell with the lamb,
    The leopard lie down with the kid,
    The calf and the beast of prey shall feed together,
    With a little child to lead them.
    The cow and the bear shall graze,
    Their young shall lie down together,
    And the lion, like the ox, shall eat straw.
    (Just like a STFUPSIN post, it most likely will never happen.)
    PS:”Letting” the farm animals die off on their own or roam around like wild animals sounds stupid and who’s going to stop people from raising animals in private? Animals will still get sick, they’re mammals. Isn’t it inevitable that they will get sick? Our pet dogs/cats/mice get sick, why can’t pigs and cattle?

  46. Let me say right off that I have no interest in getting into the meat/no meat debate. And I am to a scientist as a cat is to a waffle iron (i.e. I know nothing) but I do know me a little about pigs in the traditional farming sense. They put out a lot of poop and other mess. Even on a small farm with a few pigs, you really have to keep on top of the waste situation.

    So I can imagine that where you have a huge open air pig waste lagoon full of poop and pee and viruses (which you find all through the American “heartland”), and birds come to see if there’s anything worth eating or drinking in it, a few of them maybe fall in and die, and things start to get really nasty really fast.

    My solution would be requiring these huge farms – indeed any farm with over maybe 25 pigs – to provide waste water treatment. Everyone thinks that farmers will scream their heads off, but the good ones already practice good animal hygiene – it’s the corporations that will bitch, and hide behind the increasingly mythical small farmer.

    Of course, we have no direct control over factory farms in other countries, but we do have control over imports.

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