Swine flu – Feh

Ok, I’m a pig.

I should be used to humans beings distorting reality to fit their own little preconceptions. Taping dogs to refrigerators is cruelty[1], but making pigs live in circumstances that make a little refrigerator taping look like a vacation to the Caribbean just because some of you humans think we taste better than dogs is OK.

(Have you tried dog recently? You ought to.)

But I digress. We are here to talk about swine flu.

Swine flu? People don’t even notice it when it’s only a porcine problem. You people start whining when they get it. But when you get it, it isn’t a swine infection anymore, is it? You give the poor birds the same bum rap. Or even other humans, if they live on some other continent.

It’s understandable that you humans name things you don’t like for things that don’t fall too close to your doorways. Even the word you use for the behavior, scape-goating, comes from a classical case of us animals getting screwed over for human problems. It’s hard for you to blame yourselves for your own problems. It would be nice, though, if you took a bit more care to get the association between cause and effect right.

You just might notice that high density populations of host animals, be they humans, chickens, or pigs, give viruses fantastic opportunity to multiply, mingle and mutate. Factory farms, thus, provide the perfect places for breeding new strains of viruses. And believe me, they aren’t high-class neighborhoods.

(As an aside, human population isn't going to destroy civilization by starvation - instead, the human equivalents of factory farms are going to serve as the breeding ground for diseases that will overwhelm the best medical systems.)
 

From the news reports[2],[3], it appears that the latest “swine flu” outbreak originated in a small town in Mexico, not far from a large “industrial pig production facility”, owned by a subsidiary of the US-based Smithfield Foods. While not all the data is in, there is speculation that the original vectors for the virus were flies which frequented the manure lagoons of the pig farm. It’s even possible that the original strain was communicated from humans to pigs – though there is some suspicion that birds were involved, too. Poor birds.

I would suggest that, in fairness to my fellow swine, that this strain be renamed the “Smithfield flu”.

(For a less porco-centric perspective, see Biosurveillance, “Swine Flu in Mexico- Timeline of Events”, http://biosurveillance.typepad.com/biosurveillance/2009/04/swine-flu-in-mexico-timeline-of-events.html )