Swine Flu and Industrial Farming

IGTN · Post by **IGTN** » Wed Apr 29, 2009 4:05 am

I've been hearing about this latest outbreak of H1N1 swine flu, and, specifically, about how it might have started on an industrial pig farm.

There's been a lot of panic about the flu mixed in with the good advice. I've been hearing the usual (wash your hands frequently, cough and sneeze into a tissue or sleeve, not your bare hand, etc.), and read a comment about air travel being a huge risk for catching anything anyone brings onto the plane. What are the best ways to reduce the risk of catching it, and what increases it?

Come to think of it, how dangerous is it, really? It's killed people (roughly 5% of suspected cases, according to Wikipedia), but Wikipedia says only in Mexico so far, even though the US has fully half as many confirmed cases as Mexico. How does access to health care affect the danger?

From what I hear, it's not a coincidence that this started in a factory farm, since they're disease-infested and nothing is really done about viruses, while bacteria are bred for antibiotic resistance. How frequently do factory farms produce new diseases for us? Put another way, are they giant bioweapons labs pointed at humanity?

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Wed Apr 29, 2009 5:25 am

IGTN wrote:How frequently do factory farms produce new diseases for us? Put another way, are they giant bioweapons labs pointed at humanity?

Yes. They produce almost as many diseases as that bullshit "in house" pastoralism of China.

-Username17

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Wed Apr 29, 2009 5:41 am

Read something about the effects of factory farming on the environment sometime. Or don't. It's really that bad. Like the most polluted parts of, say, Eastern Europe during the most heavy period of industrialization? It beats that out.

Occasionally we'll get some people complaining about the method but people associate complaining about factory farming with PETA sometime. And thus this issue is something akin to gun control in the United States, where we can't even talk about it without people screaming their heads off. And unlike gun control, people don't worry about being poisoned by a river of pig shit and everyone loves meat. Some traction might get made when we tie this in with disease prevention and we remind people of the horrible conditions within, but wait what happens when some suit goes 'but yeah, bacon costs half as much'.

cthulhu · Post by **cthulhu** » Wed Apr 29, 2009 5:50 am

WHO is being ambivalent about what is actually killing the mexicans. It appears possible, if not probable that the mexicans are dying of secondary causes and not the flu itself.

That said, its still dangerous.

Crissa · Post by **Crissa** » Wed Apr 29, 2009 6:04 am

It actually is hard to tell which disease kills people if there's more than one... You sorta hafta know what to look for.

Swine flu is bad mostly because there's no immunization for it, so if it were to jump from healthy groups to people who are at risk... That's the big worry. If it spreads fast and can get to them before we have an immunization, we will have deaths.

-Crissa

ckafrica · Post by **ckafrica** » Wed Apr 29, 2009 6:27 am

FrankTrollman wrote: Yes. They produce almost as many diseases as that bullshit "in house" pastoralism of China.

In all fairness it wasn't that long ago that Europeans we're doing the same thing. In Vietnam most of the people who do it do so to prevent people from stealing their animals.

The problem with factory farms is different from close cohabitation. Cohabitation greatly increases the chances of cross-species disease transference. This is what is happening with the Bird Flu.

The problem with factory farms (and even most "organic" meat production btw) is that the animals are not being fed the food they evolved to consume and therefore they are perpetually sick and only manage to survive by receiving an ongoing regimen of antibiotics (which is considered to potentially be the largest contributor of antibiotic-resistant strains of diseases)

Side Note: A really interesting book on food supply is "The Omnivore's Dilemma" by Michael Pollan.

cthulhu · Post by **cthulhu** » Wed Apr 29, 2009 7:00 am

Crissa wrote:It actually is hard to tell which disease kills people if there's more than one... You sorta hafta know what to look for.

Swine flu is bad mostly because there's no immunization for it, so if it were to jump from healthy groups to people who are at risk... That's the big worry. If it spreads fast and can get to them before we have an immunization, we will have deaths.

-Crissa

Maybe I should say easily preventable causes?

They are chunking away on a vaccine though, but yeah, will probably be over at some point.

name_here · Post by **name_here** » Wed Apr 29, 2009 10:50 am

Actually, supposedly two things are true about the believed origin farm:
1. No trace of swine flu has been found in their pigs
2. no one at or near the farm is sick.

Mind, i'm trusting my local paper on this.

As for what's doing the killing, it seems that it's peumonia brought on by the flu, which is a cause of death with a highly successful history in pandemic flus.

The good news is that tamiflu apparently works on it, and we have absolutely absurd supplies of it.