Kill the Pigs?
By John Batchelor on April 28, 2009 at 9:05 AM in Current Affairs, Health Care
Reporting from Mexico Points to a Veracruz State Pig Farm in February.
Henry Miller, Hoover Institution, reported Sunday 26 consistent with his years of work with J B S that the most likely source of the killer swine flu (an antigenic creation, part swine, avian and human virus) is the rural humans who live in close proximity to pig livestock. Here is the pay-off for Henry Miller’s prescience for identifying the pig as the killer’s kitchen. The Virginia-based pork empire Smithfield Foods partly owns a massive Confined Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO) in La Gloria, in deeply agrarian Veracruz
State, where Mexican officials now argue the swine flu outbreak commenced in mid February. The first victim, Patient Zero Hombre So Far, was a four year-old boy, who has since recovered. not waiting on the pig disputations. Russia, China and the Philippines have stopped pork imports. A CAFO is a mega pig farm, and in La Gloria there are one million pigs under clouds of black flies and a suffocating stink. It is also called a manure lagoon. Some other residents fell sick in February. Health officials sealed the town and sprayed the flies that swarmed through the homes. Conditions deteriorated:
According to reports gathered on the website of James Wilson, a founding member of the Biosurveillance Indication and Warning Analysis Community (BIWAC), about 60 per cent of La Gloria’s 3,000-strong population have sought medical assistance since February.
“Residents claimed that three pediatric cases, all under two years of age, died from the outbreak,” wrote Mr Wilson. “However, officials stated that there was no direct link between the pediatric deaths and the outbreak; they said the three fatal cases were isolated and not related to each other.”
Smithfield Farms now states that the company found no signs of swine flu in La Gloria or in any of its herds. A speaker for Mexico National Organization of Pig Production and Producers says, “We deny…” Meanwhile the caseload in Mexico is accelerating: Two thousand have been hospitalised with “grave pneumonia.” Half have made a recovery so far. Authorities in Asia and Europe are not waiting on the pig disputations. Russia China and the Philippines have stopped pork imports form Mexico. Ham and bacon will soon disappear from the menu and the meat counter — (Order it in writing boldly when the waitress asks, “What’s ya poison, ace?”) – and perhaps also global recovery will hesitate with the patrons.
Mortality Rate.
Henry Miller also pointed to the early and unreliable math of a mortality rate between 6-7%. This would be not the nightmare scenario of the Spanish influenza pandemic of 1917-1918, which killed at the rate of 60%. But it is staggeringly high for modern expectations. The scale of the populations in Mexico and along the US border now vulnerable to infection over the warm weather months is 50 million and up. This describes a national numbness. There is reason for better news. Henry Miller writes me that the mortality rate depends upon the number of infected overall, and there may be tens of thousand more than reported in the Mexican two thousand so far, just because people in Mexico don’t usually report a small fever and recovery. This could lower the mortality rate to well under 1%, which is consistent with yearly flu. We can still fret if we want like the folk looking harried and unprepped at the emergency CDC communication center (right). For light reading at the CDC coffee counter, Henry Miller adds the dystopian details of the opening chapter of a thriller: “Kill the Pigs!”
“If the swine flu outbreak becomes a pandemic with a high rate of severe complications (such as pneumonia) and death, we will need to be smart, nimble and flexible. That will involve triage on many levels — including decisions about which patients are likely to benefit from scarce commodities such as drugs and ventilators — as well as “social engineering” determinations about issues such as mandatory quarantine, the canceling of public events, shutting airports and closing our southern border….”
by Ronald Scott
* More novels by 
* 
(
)
- You'll have access to 18 million movies, TV shows, songs, magazines, and books, as well as ultra-fast Web browsing with Amazon Silk -- faster than iPad. Full e-mail and document access and a keyboard. Fire can transmit what is on your screen onto a connected TV or monitor without an accessory. It runs Flash (iPad doesn't). 
Pingback: Jerry Brown’s “Green California Liberals” weigh in on Slo Food, Food Chain issues and a few other things, plus Swine… « Valentine Bonnaire