Mega farms to blame for current flu outbreak

Harish Mehta, Business Times 5 May 09;

SO the American farm lobby has been successful in removing the swine from the flu and getting the virus called by its scientific label - A(H1N1) - instead.

Last week US farm groups wanted to rename the virus 'North American influenza'. 'Swine flu is a misnomer,' said C Larry Pope, chief executive of Smithfield Foods, who said he feared panic among consumers.

In fact, the swine flu outbreak highlights the lack of regulation of mega pig 'factory farms' in the US and in their subsidiaries in Mexico. The viruses breed because these mega units are overcrowded with pigs.

North Carolina boasts some of America's biggest factory farms, besides having the densest population of pigs and double the number of pig processing factory farms than any other US state.

Samuel Epstein, professor emeritus of Environmental and Occupational Medicine at the University of Illinois School of Public Health, told The Business Times that pigs raised in close proximity with humans are the probable cause of the outbreak.

Robert Webster, an expert on the evolution of the flu virus, argues that North American farmers are practising intensive farming involving raising pigs and poultry in adjacent sheds with the same workers. As it is now clear, this poses a danger to human health.

The genetic lineage of the swine flu virus can be traced to a virus first seen in a North Carolina pig factory farm in 1998. That year, thousand of pigs in the farm fell ill. Researchers found an aggressive virus, H3N2, similar to the flu virus that has affected humans for more than 40 years. Researchers thought this was extremely worrisome because only one type of human virus had earlier been found in US pigs. Even more alarming was the discovery that it was not just a pig virus. It was a deadly hybrid of a human, bird and pig virus.

From North Carolina, as the live pigs were transported across America to their ultimate destination on grocery store shelves, the virus made its debilitating appearance in Texas, Minnesota and Iowa, and within a year in many more places in the United States.

Farms morphed into factories in the early 1990s when the American pig industry adopted a new model of efficient farming. Small dispersed farms were merged into mega farms, squeezing the large number of animals into living areas the size of industrial factories. More than 10 million pigs that lived in more than 15,000 farms were crowded into 2,000 farms. Now almost everyone is agreed that overcrowding is the principal cause of the appearance of the new virus.

The 60 million US pig population, scientists believe, has tremendous potential for causing human pandemics in the future. Like the US, Mexico is home to hundreds of mega pig factory farms. Not surprisingly, most are owned by US companies because of the lure of cheap labour, and access to the lucrative Latin American market.

For the present, the scientific community is worried that the unfettered circulation of the triple hybrid virus may result in the mutation to a new generation of viruses.

North Carolina journalist Tom Philpott has studied the link between the swine flu outbreak and Virginia-based Smithfield Foods, the world's largest pork producer. According to his study, the current outbreak started in Veracruz, Mexico, where a Smithfield subsidiary produces a million pigs a year.

People living close to the factory believe the outbreak was caused by contamination from the factory farm. A Mexican newspaper has also reported on a possible connection between the Smithfield farm and the outbreak. However, the company has said there are no signs of swine flu at its farms in Mexico. Other Mexican factory farms have denied that the swine flu outbreak originated in their farms. Their denials, however, contradict Mexican government confirmation that the outbreak did originate from pigs in that country.

Meanwhile, the US Department of Agriculture on April 28 assured consumers that US pork was safe to consume, and there was no evidence of US pigs being infected with the virus. The World Health Organisation has clarified that it is all right to eat pork if properly cooked to 170 degrees F, and that flu viruses are not known to be transmittable to humans by eating pork.

Official confirmation that pork is safe to eat will no doubt reassure consumers. But given its potential to disrupt the global economy, it is far more important that the conditions which enable the virus to breed and mutate into ever more deadly strains be tackled.

Everyone should also be told how the US (and Mexican) authorities plan to regulate the factory farms and ensure that another killer virus does not emerge a few years down the road.

The writer, based in Toronto, specialises in environmental and intellectual property rights issues