| Mexican Journalists are linking the Swine Flu to appalling factory farm conditions in Mexico - Swine Flu Linked to Smithfield Factory Farms by Mexican Press
Smithfield's factory farms, in Perote, Mexico, in the state of Vera Cruz, keeps over a million pigs on site. Researchers have traced the beginnings of the epidemic back to this area.
The Smithfield CAFO dumps huge amounts of untreated pig waste into lagoons. Unfortunate nearby residents have long complained of horrible odors in the air and water, and swarms of flies hovering around pig waste lagoons. Like their counterparts who live in CAFO-heavy U.S. areas, the residents of Perote also complain of respiratory ailments. 30 percent of Perote residents are now infected with the Swine Flu.
"The ducks, the ducks, the ducks are the key to the whole damned thing," Webster once exclaimed to a Newsday reporter. Due to the growing industrialization and pollution of migratory aquatic flyways, wild ducks are landing in increasing numbers on these farmed fish ponds. The influenza virus found naturally and harmlessly in ducksí intestines are excreted in the water. The chickens may drink the virus-laden water. The pigs then eat the virus-laden chicken feces. The ducks then drink the pond water contaminated by the virus-laden pig excrement and the cycle can continue. The pond water ends up a "complete soup" of viruses, admits the head of the Hong Kong environmental think tank Civic Exchange. Dead ducks or chickens may also be fed to pigs, providing another potential route of infection. This risky practice is not limited to Asia. In the H5N2 outbreak in the United States in the 1980s, pigs raised under chicken houses in Pennsylvania and fed dead birds came down with the infection as well.
Integrating pigs and aquaculture affords this waterborne duck virus a rather unique opportunity to cycle through a mammalian species, accumulating mutations that may better enable it to adapt to mammalian physiology. Migratory ducks could then theoretically fly the mutant virus thousands of miles to distribute it to other ponds, pigs, and ducks across the continent. Although there is concern that the virus could infiltrate the abdominal fluid or even the muscle meat of the farmed fish, the aquatic animals are largely thought to be innocent bystanders. Without the Trojan duck vectors, fish farming wouldn't pose a pandemic threat. Likewise, without the pigs, the fish farms would be no riskier than the thousands of Canadian lakes where ducks congregate and discharge virus into the water every summer. Any spoonful of lake water from this "veritable witches brew of avian influenza" (as Webster puts it) may contain virus, but as long as it stays between ducks, as it has for millions of years up until domestication, it poses no pandemic threat." http://birdflubook.com/a.php?id=57
Indeed, its beginning to look like Pigs on the Wing...
As of today, 4/28/09, 45 cases of swine flu in New York (http://www.cdc.gov/swineflu/)
Cross posted: http://buffalowatch.blogspot.c... |
