Swine Flu, Factory Pig Farms and the Pandemic Waiting to Happen

Photo: China Photos / Getty Images

related articles

There are all sorts of reasons to avoid eating too much meat, especially if it's from animals raised on so-called factory farms (known to the industry and its regulators as concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs). There's animal welfare, since the animals are typically kept in cramped conditions that are likely to turn the stomach of many people. There's the environmental cost, since the meat from an animal feeds fewer people than the feed and water used to raise that animal could. There's the concern about antibiotic-resistant strains of disease, since animals in close quarters are often treated before an outbreak happens, leading to the possibility of bacteria growing resistant to medicines humans need to stay healthy.

And then, there is swine flu.

Investigators don't yet know where the new virus sweeping through the Mexican capital originated, or how it developed into an infectious, sometimes deadly illness that seems to pass from person to person.

But experts have been warning for years that this type of outbreak was all but inevitable, given the way we raise and transport food (and ourselves).

The virus that has prompted a U.S. health emergency declaration has genetic material from the viruses that typically attack birds, humans and pigs. That combination didn't necessarily originate on a pig farm, but it's more than likely. Where else do you have pigs in close quarters, passing viruses among themselves? Where else do you have birds, either raised nearby as poultry or passing by during migrations? Where else do you have humans, working in and among the pigs, their wastes and their meat...and then going home to their families?

Both the New York Times' Andrew Revkin in his Dot Earth blog, and David Kirby on Huffington Post, write intelligently and in depth about this issue.

Organizations like Wildlife Trust have for years been warning about this type of outbreak -- an estimated 75% of human illness originates with wildlife (think Lyme disease, West Nile virus and every other strain of flu). The term used to describe that study is conservation medicine, since preventing and treating outbreaks typically means tackling environmental problems as well.

For instance, in 1999, the deadly Nipah virus spread from bats to humans to pigs because of deforestation of jungles of Borneo and Malaysia. How? As the rain forest was cleared by fire, the Malaysian flying fox, a fruit bat, colonized the orchards on pig farms. As bat waste and half-eaten fruit mingled with pig feed, pigs were exposed to a new virus, which in turn infected pig farmers. More than 100 people died -- 40% of those infected -- and 1 million pigs were slaughtered as a precaution...and several subsequent outbreaks have claimed dozens more lives.

Are factory farms in Mexico the environmental root of this swine flu outbreak? Is it a global pandemic in the making? Experts will have to determine that. What they have already determined is that factory farms pose a risk of global pandemic such as we seem to be watching emerge.

COMMENTS ()