Home
| Health
| Viruses
| Swine Flu
| Factory Farming and the Swine Flu
Factory Farming and the Swine Flu
by Douglas Christian Larsen
-
Overview
3468be7e-de46-1313-0369-a29b26f88493400300
It is a loud and volatile issue, whether or not "Swine Flu" is tied directly to modern factory-farm methods. The chief reason for the hullabaloo is that scientific truth might chisel away factory farming profits.
-
Origins: Bird Flu
Viral diseases pass genetically from animals to people through reassortment and mutation, including measles, tuberculosis, small pox, Ebola, mad cow and bubonic plague. Influenza originated in birds, and is prevalent in wild migratory fowl without killing them.
2caed112-7cfa-a0e3-2ed3-fa98ee8881b1400300
-
Transmission
Swine are the perfect breeding ground, as they are a link between humans and birds. Pigs get sick from humans, and vice versa, and birds and pigs can also pass disease back and forth. As reported on the Wired.com website by Brandon Keim, "industrial farms are super-incubators for viruses."
10f5f8b3-9fa1-6148-895a-4120e1f8d8db400300
-
Reluctance to Report
As Roberta Rampton reported at Reuters, U.S. farmers are not easily persuaded to report to authorities when their swine are ill, while in Asia, millions of domestic chickens and ducks are purposefully culled.
-
Reassortment
Influenza has spread from migratory birds to domestic chickens, and through the evolution of reassortment---when varied flu viruses combine with different subtypes to produce a new virus---passed to swine, and ultimately to people.
-
Factory Farming Danger
Current factory farming practices force animals to live compacted too closely together near human beings. As Jonathan Safran Froer states on the CNN website, "It's a perfect storm: The animals have been bred to such extremes that sickness is inevitable, and the living conditions promote illness."
