The nasty bits

Symptom: swine flu. Diagnosis: industrial agriculture? 27

Several days after news broke of a possible link between Mexico-based hog CAFOs and the rapid spread of a novel swine-flu strain, what have we learned?

• Clarifying details about respiratory ailments in the Perote area of Vera Cruz State—where U.S. pork behemoth Smithfield Foods raises nearly a million hogs a year in large confinement buildings, under a subsidiary called Granjas Carroll—have emerged. In my original post on this topic, I didn’t fully understand that the outbreak of a virulent respiratory condition in the town of La Gloria—located near Smithfield’s farming operations—wasn’t initially identified as swine flu. The disease emerged as early as February and infected 60 percent of the town’s 1,800 inhabitants, according to the widely cited blog Biosurveillance, run by the U.S. disease-tracking consultancy Veratract (which claims the CDC, the World Health Organization, and the Pan-American Health Organization as clients). Three children died during the outbreak, Veratract reports. Residents blamed the Granjas Carroll confinements for the outbreak; and local authorities evidently agreed. “Health workers soon intervened, sealing off the town and spraying chemicals to kill the flies [which grew in swarms on Granjas Caroll’s manure lagoons] that were reportedly swarming through people’s homes,” according to a Monday account in the Guardian.

There was evidently much confusion about the cause of the disease. “According to residents, the [Granjas Carroll] denied responsibility for the outbreak and attributed the cases to ‘flu,’” Veratract reports. And “State health officials also implemented a vaccination campaign against influenza.” However, “physicians ruled out influenza as the cause of the outbreak.” Yet the symptoms experienced in La Gloria closely resemble those that would later be diagnosed as swine flu, according to several accounts. The Guardian quotes a La Gloria resident:

The symptoms were exactly like the ones they talk about now [with swine flu] .... High fevers, pain in the muscles and the joints, terrible headaches, some vomiting and diarrhoea. The illness came on very quickly and whole families were laid up.

• On Monday, Mexican authorities revealed that at least one victim of the original outbreak definitely had the same strain of swine flu now wreaking havoc in Mexico City—and his is the earliest known case of the disease. The Associated Press reported Monday that:

Mexican Health Secretary Jose Angel Cordova said tests now show that a 4-year-old boy contracted swine flu in Veracruz state, where a community has been protesting pollution from a large pig farm, at least two weeks before the first death confirmed by the Mexican government. The farm is run by Granjas Carroll de Mexico.

The question now becomes: Did the outbreak that started in February and killed three kids involve swine flu—or was the 4-year-old boy’s infection an isolated case? If not—if the La Gloria epidemic turns out to be ground zero of the infection—could the swine-flu outbreak have originated literally in the shadows of Granjas Carroll’s hog confinements, and not have some tie to intensive hog farming? That’s a question that health authorities have to vigorously pursue.

• In a statement issued late Sunday, Smithfield said it had “found no clinical signs or symptoms of the presence of swine influenza in the company’s swine herd or its employees at its joint ventures in Mexico.” The wording is interesting here—“no signs or symptoms,” but no information about actual testing of pigs for flu strains. Could pigs carry a flu virus without being visibly ill? Tara Smith, an epidemiologist at the University of Iowa who has done groundbreaking work around hog confinements and the emergence of the deadly, antibiotic-resistant MRSA staph infection, told me in an interview that one would expect to see at least some sign of sickness in hogs carrying a flu bug. Of course, precisely for biosecurity reasons, CAFO operators rabidly resist visitors. When I toured a CAFO-intense county in Iowa a couple of years ago and approached a massive, reeking hog building, an employee rushed to intercept me, claiming that germs from a single healthy human could wipe out an entire 10,000-hog confinement. Confined hogs, you see, are extremely immune-compromised. One hopes that health authorities have been allowed to inspect the Granjas Carroll facilities. 

It’s important to note as well that non-symptomatic pigs can carry flu. Here is a line from the World Health Organization’s recently posted FAQ on swine flu: “The virus is spread among pigs by aerosols, direct and indirect contact, and asymptomatic carrier pigs” (emphasis mine).

• Citizens of La Gloria, as well as some Mexican public-health workers, have pointed to flies congregating on manure piles as a possible vector for the flu, as I reported in my earlier post. Several commenters dismissed that possibility, denying that flies can carry flu viruses. From what I can tell, those folks are wrong. I recently got my hands on a paper by an international team of scientists—including Jay Graham and Ellen Silbergeld of Johns Hopkins—published in the May-June 2008 Public Health Reports. The paper, “The Animal-Human Interface and Infectious Disease in Industrial Food Animal Production: Rethinking Biosecurity and Biocontainment” (PDF), points to a concrete example of flies acting as a flu vector:

[R]esearch conducted during an HPAI outbreak in Kyoto, Japan, in 2004 found that flies caught in proximity to broiler facilities where the outbreak took place carried the same strains of H5N1 influenza virus as found in chickens of an infected poultry farm.

• The public-health scientific community has been sounding the alarm for years about the potential for bio-catastrophe brewing on industrial animal farms. The Graham/Sibergeld paper crystallizes those concerns. I’ll tease out a few key themes.

Untreated manure in lagoons, pointed to by La Gloria residents as a health hazard, can indeed contain flu strains.

Animal biosolids contain a range of pathogens that may include influenza viruses, which can persist for extended periods of time in the absence of specific treatment.

Regulatory regimes, in the U.S. and elsewhere, tend to be lax. Sanitary laws demand the treatment of human sewage; animal waste is a different story:

Apart from some use in animal feeds and aquaculture, poultry and swine wastes are almost entirely managed by land disposal. Pathogens can survive in untreated and land-disposed wastes from food animals for extended periods of time—between two and 12 months for bacteria and between three and six months for viruses. [emphasis mine]

The amount of untreated waste allowed to fester in CAFOs globally is stunning.

The volume of animal wastes is significant, reflecting the considerable expansion of food animal production globally. In the U.S., it is estimated that 238,000 CAFOs produce 314 million metric tons of waste per year, which is 100 times as much biosolids produced by treating human wastewater. Global estimates suggest that 140 million metric tons of poultry litter and 460 million metric tons of swinewaste were produced in 2003, based on data from the Food and Agriculture Organization. [Emphasis added.]

And of course, this vast amount of manure is highly concentrated geographically. For example, the bulk of pork consumed in the United States comes from a handful of counties in Iowa and North Carolina. In Mexico, the Perote region of Vera Cruz carries the burden of intensive hog production. The relatively few workers who staff these industrial farms, as well as the residents who live nearby, are vulnerable to the pathogens—and can carry them to far-flung populations.

Workers involved in removing the wastes from animal houses, transporting wastes, and spreading wastes on land are especially at risk of exposure to pathogens through inhalation, dermal contact, and hand-to-mouth transfers.

Regulations for protecting those workers tend to be ... not so strict.

In the U.S., as in much of the world, there is little regulation of occupational conditions or worker exposures in most high-density animal houses. The conditions of work ... provide many opportunities for both worker infection and transfer to others in the community. With the exception of concerns about disposal of dead chickens during an outbreak, there has been minimal attention to animal-human interactions associated with the operation and management of broiler poultry houses. Many workers are provided little or no protective clothing or pportunities for personal hygiene or decontamination on-site. Our studies of poultry house workers in Maryland indicate that workers take their clothes home for washing. Thus, it is not surprising that increased risks of pathogen exposure and infections, both bacterial and viral, have been reported among farmers, their families, and farm workers at poultry and swine operations. [again, my emphasis]

• Vera Cruz authorities are suddenly scrambling to deny any link between the Granjas Carroll confinements and the outbreak. Instead, they claim, the flu came from Asia. Say they’re right and the outbreak near the Granjas Carroll confinements is traced directly to an Asian source. Even under that scenario, as the Graham/Silbergeld paper shows, the globe’s rapidly growing meat industry is creating conditions for virulent pathogens, both viral and microbrial, to thrive. As they write:

Industrial-scale poultry production is expanding rapidly in Asia, Africa, Latin America, North Africa, and the Near East. Concerns have been raised over the relatively weak veterinary and public health infrastructure in some of these countries. Swine production is also increasing; for example, in China, pork production increased from 42 million tons to 51 million tons from 2001 to 2006. This increase is largely related to the expansion of the integrated or industrial model of production led by both national  and multinational corporations for expanding markets of increasingly urban consumer populations within these countries as well as exports.

The results of this trend—in Chinese pork production, at least, driven in large part by Smithfield—threaten to be dire.

These new methods of food animal production generate many routes of pathogen
transfer among wild and domesticated species and from animals to humans through occupational, peri-occupational, and environmental pathways. At the animal-human interface in these operations, there is inadequate protection of workers and their communities, and, more generally, there is incomplete biocontainment to prevent transfers from the animal house to the general environment.

For more background on confinement operations, see my 2007 special report—“Sow what? On food and farming.”

Grist food editor Tom Philpott farms and cooks at Maverick Farms, a sustainable-agriculture nonprofit and small farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. Follow my Twitter feed; contact me at tphilpott[at]grist[dot]org.

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  1. racje Posted 11:47 am
    28 Apr 2009

    These are interesting speculations and connections, especially the immunocompromised hogs in confinement. I'd like to know if there are published science articles pointing to a connection between virus mutation and immunocompromised farm animals.

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  2. El Dragón's avatar

    El Dragón Posted 1:32 pm
    28 Apr 2009

    Nice work, Tom. This is much harder to refute, so thank you. :)The "fly paper" is interesting. I've read evidence of flies carrying bird-to-bird avian flu (like the notorious H5N1) but not as carriers of swine flu or human-to-human flu. That's where I remain stuck, and I think you remain stuck there, too. So while I learned something here, I don't think we have a direct trail from the manure-lagoon to La Gloria or to Oaxaca where the other earliest patient lived:http://www.fairfoodfight.com/blog/el-dragón/earliest-known-mexican-patient-lived-no-where-near-smithfield-cafoBut is the Smithfield CAFO worth investigating? I think you've made a great argument that it certainly is.If the CAFO is ground zero for Mexico, my money is on infected pigs being shipped in from a Chinese or European operation -- fragments of H1N1's DNA have been spotted in those areas before.If it's not the CAFO, I'm thinking that what we really have in Mexico is a double outbreak, with H1N1 in one corner, and flu-like respiratory disorders spreading from the Smithfield feedlot in the other, 

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  3. Lifeforce Posted 1:37 pm
    28 Apr 2009

    Evidence that Flies Spread Avian Flu was reported in the April 2007 issue of "Poultry International,". The evidence showing that common flies may be able to transmit influenza viruses in and out of poultry facilities.[7]
    Before the emergence of H5N1, the largest outbreak of bird flu in history wasn't in Asia; it was in Pennsylvania in 1983-84, resulting in the costliest animal disease eradication in U.S. history and the deaths of 17 million birds. In this U.S. outbreak of a highly pathogenic H5N2 strain, researchers found that over one-third of mature houseflies recovered from affected facilities were carrying the virus. Universal fly infestation is inherent to poultry production:
    One cannot effectively keep flies out of a poultry facility.[8]
    [7] Mabbett T. 2007. Another good reason to control houseflies: they carry bird flu virus. Poultry International. April, pp. 16-7.

    And evidence shows that houseflies on cattle farms may contribute to the spread of Escherichia coli O157:H7 among animals, their food supply and potentially humans say researchers from Kansas. Their findings appear in the December 2004 issue of the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology.

    E. coli, one of the leading causes of food-borne diseases throughout the world, is responsible for more than 73,000 cases annually in the United States alone. E. coli O157:H7 can be life-threatening to children, the elderly and immuno-compromised patients. The intestinal tracts of cattle serve as the main reservoir for E. coli O157:H7 and the environment in which they are housed frequently attracts large populations of houseflies (HF).

    "One of the potential modes of dissemination of this pathogen in the environment is by insects that are associated with animal feces and manure, primarily houseflies," say the researchers.

    In the study houseflies were gathered from the feed bunks of a cattle farm in Kansas from June through October 2003. E.coli O157:H7 was found in every batch of houseflies collected, with 30% of the positive houseflies coming from a flaked corn shed. Ninety percent of the isolates contained genes indicating highly virulent strains.

    "Our study demonstrated that houseflies carry virulent E. coli O157:H7 in the farm environment primarily during the summer and may play an important role in the ecology and transmission of this pathogen among individual cattle and potentially to the surrounding farm and urban environment," say the researchers. "Information on the association of E. coli O157:H7 with houseflies will assist in developing more comprehensive and quantitative risk assessments, as well as formulating E. coli O157:H7 intervention strategies that should include an effective HF management program."

    (M.J. Alam, L. Zurek. 2004. Association of Escherichia coli O157:H7 with houseflies on a cattle farm. Applied and Environmental Microbiology, 70. 12: 7578-7580.)

    Houseflies Collected In Fast Food Restaurants Found To Carry Antibiotic Resistant Bacteria
    17 Jun 2006

    Houseflies in food-handling and serving facilities carry and may have the capacity to transfer antibiotic-resistant and potentially virulent bacteria say researchers Kansas State University. They report their findings in the June 2006 issue of the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology.

    Multi-drug resistance is a serious problem plaguing the world today as the number of antibiotics effective at treating human infections continues to decline. Although it is not yet well understood, preliminary research has indicated a connection between antibiotic resistance and food of animal origin. Experts are now examining the role that insects that develop in decaying organic material (specifically manure) may play in transmitting antibiotic resistant bacteria to residential settings.

    Enterococci are commonly found in animal and human digestive tracts and are known for their frequent multi-antibiotic resistance. Two of the 26 species, Enterococcus faecalis and Enterococcus faecium are responsible for the majority of human infections. In the study the digestive tracts of 260 houseflies collected from five fast food restaurants were tested for enteroccoci and characterized. Ninety-seven percent tested positive for the bacteria with E. faecalis identified in the majority of the isolates (88.2%). E. faecalis was found to carry virulence genes and have varying percentages of resistance to tetracycline, erythromycin, streptomycin, ciproflaxin and kanamycin. E. faecium showed up at a rate of 6.8%.

    "This study showed that houseflies in food-handling and serving facilities carry antibiotic-resistant and potentially virulent enterococci that have the capacity for horizontal transfer of antibiotic resistance genes to other bacteria," say the researchers.

    L. Macovei, L. Zurek. 2006. Ecology of antibiotic resistance genes: characterization of enterococci from houseflies collected in food settings. Applied and Environmental Microbiology, 72. 6: 4028-4035.


    In BC the transmission of health hazards by flies is written into the guide to deposing of animals. It states “
    Primary environmental concerns related to dead animal disposal are: 1. death due to disease that results in disease spread. 2. holding or burial sites that result in surface or ground water or air pollution. 3. flies or rodents that results in disease transfer to people, livestock or wildlife. And 4. attraction of predators to the site that may be undesirable for wildlife.

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  4. countryswing Posted 4:26 pm
    28 Apr 2009

    Tom, how do you jump to the conclusion that industrial agriculture is causing this?  You re-hash old arguements at tedious length, but in the end you are taking it on faith that this must have come from a CAFO.  If I say "the devil is responsible" you would rightly laugh me out of the room.  But Smithfield CAFO's are your devil and your opinion is "faith based".  Let's keep science separate from faith. Cheers.

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  5. samlaunch Posted 5:27 am
    29 Apr 2009

    Thank You Tom. First of all, I had no idea that flies can carry the disease and secondly, you took the time to enlighten the unsuspecting populace. It's hard to find people of your ilk in today's 'don't tell the truth or we'll throw you in jail' era. I've seen that this strain of flu that they are calling swine has not been found in pigs. They should check the flies for vectoring their murderous skills into the unsuspecting communities. Here is an excerpt from natural news: "According to reports in the mainstream media (which has no reason to lie about this particular detail), this strain of influenza contains viral code fragments from:
    • Human influenza
    • Bird Flu from North America
    • Swine flu from Europe
    • Swine flu from Asia
    This is rather astonishing to realize, because for this to have been a natural combination of viral fragments, it means an infected bird from North America would have had to infect pigs in Europe, then be re-infected by those some pigs with an unlikely cross-species mutation that allowed the bird to carry it again, then that bird would have had to fly to Asia and infected pigs there, and those Asian pigs then mutated the virus once again (while preserving the European swine and bird flu elements) to become human transmittable, and then a human would have had to catch that virus from the Asian pigs -- in Mexico! -- and spread it to others. (This isn't the only explanation of how it could have happened, but it is one scenario that gives you an idea of the complexity of such a thing happening)."

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  6. lindaamick Posted 6:27 am
    29 Apr 2009

    In Feb, 2009 the Czech press published an article that Baxter International had shipped virus to a lab in Austria.  It turned out that the virus was live as it killed Ferrets after injection.  In March, 2009 the Toronto Sun reported that Baxter had sent this "live" virus to 18 countries around the world.  Baxter claimed it was a mistake that they had mixed a live avian virus with an H5N1 virus. Now the US press is reporting that Baxter may get the go-ahead to develop a vaccine for the current strain of Swine flu. 

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  7. CowsEatGrass's avatar

    CowsEatGrass Posted 8:43 am
    29 Apr 2009

    There is no such conclusion in this article.  It is a set of facts and ideas that paints a vivid picture of how such a thing might happen, but the strongest statement does not assign blame, it simply urges further investigation of this possible link.  I think it presents a compelling argument to do just that.  The conclusions can be left to the epidemiologists.

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  8. samlaunch Posted 8:59 am
    29 Apr 2009

    Just the facts. If you have viral code fragments from the four, ask yourself something else besides, "Do you feel lucky? Well do ya'?" You have to ask, "Who or what government combined these ingredients into a deadly mixture and what happened to those murdered microbiologists. Could they have spilled the beans on what their colleagues were planning? What America suffers from is a fear of what they know to be true. The lies that government tells us is the truth such as in the numbers of employment, unemployment, GDP, inflation and just about any other number that arrives out of the BLS. If they lie about that, what else will they lie about? Of course, just about anything they're asked. Except the part where someone asks, "State your name for the record...":On November 16, 2001, Dr. Don C. Wiley, 57, vanished, and his abandoned rental car was found on the Hernando de Soto Bridge outside Memphis, TN.On December 10, 2001, Dr. David Schwartz, 57, was found murdered in his rural home in Loudon County, Virginia.On December 12, 2001, Dr. Benito Que was found comatose in the street near the laboratory where he worked at the University of Miami Medical School.On December 14, 2001, Set Van Nguyen was found dead in the airlock entrance to the walk-in refrigerator in the laboratory he worked at in Victoria State, Australia.And on December 23, 2001, Dr. Vladimir Pasechnik, 64, was found dead in Wiltshire, England, a village near his home.

    You can believe the government stats and whatever else they tell you. I choose to do my own reading and research, just the facts, maam. This list of murdered microbiologists is very big, you should do a Google search for dead scientists. I know the government has their own set of liars on chat boards and they even re-work information on Google and Wikipedia to suit their needs such as in the case of Martin Armstrong (he's been in prison, beaten and held without a trial). If you're a Christian, you had better bet that there's a target on your back. For one thing, your morals tell you they're lying and they know that you know they're lying like a rug.

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  9. racje Posted 9:57 am
    29 Apr 2009

    Thankes, Lifeforce. The first two references you cite do refer to influenza virus being carried by flies; the others are all about bacteria, which do not carry influenza.

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  10. Eric Posted 11:21 am
    29 Apr 2009

    This is a terrific post, and great job getting the information out there early.  There is quite a substantial body of evidence linking Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) with virulent disease.  These sites are basically incubators with the ideal conditions for new mutant disease variants to spread: immune-inhibited animals, close proximity to additional hosts, policies that ensure animal feces is widely dispersed to infect these hosts, pits of contagion perfect as a breeding ground for the new disease and clear evidence of ground water contagion that allow the mutant variants access to human populations (if they didn't first affect CAFO employees). I encourage your readers to look at the list of publications cited at Nature Network (part of the science journal Nature's online community).  See the article Priming the Pump of a Swine Flu Pandemic for a detailed analysis of the current situation.  Whether or not Smithfield's Mexican subsidiary is the source of this current outbreak (and there's good reason to suspect they are) we are creating the conditions for a new era of global pandemics.  Avian flu and swine flu have only killed a few hundred people so far.  We may not be so lucky in the future.

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  11. SRoach Posted 11:43 am
    29 Apr 2009

    The Smithfield statement may be misleading in another way. If the pigs had the flu in February as suggested in the article you would no longer expect there to be clinical signs. The disease would have passed through the herd in a few weeks. You could probably detect antibodies to the flu virus which would at least let you know whether it was there.Here is a link to an article on swine flu in a pig breeding herd. http://www.aasv.org/shap/issues/v12n2/v12n2p78.pdf. In that case the herd showed signs for only a few weeks. 

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  12. greengoblin Posted 1:37 pm
    29 Apr 2009

    I hadn't considered the connection btw confined farms and this flu breakout...--- I saw a really great video earlier that might help get some people living more water efficient lives.  Check out them out at   http://www.tomorrowsworldcompetition.com/ Students wrote and directed those, can you believe it? They're really working hard to raise awareness and get the public involved. It's a cause worth fighting for! 

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  13. Bart Anderson's avatar

    Bart Anderson Posted 2:54 pm
    29 Apr 2009

    Nice job of tracking the news, Tom.BTW, the two references you have at the beginning of the article to the Guardian should be to the Times (UK).  The URLs are right, but the link text should be changed.Bart / Energy Bulletin

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  14. ijer Posted 4:06 pm
    29 Apr 2009

    just get a look at this place in Mexico, where the things begin. 
    http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3399/3486222703_28bfdd0abf.jpg
    http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3416/3486228353_d872db75bf_o.jpg
    http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3392/3487039288_9e308e988c.jpg
    http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3397/3487094036_8921fcf745_o.jpg

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  15. ijer Posted 4:06 pm
    29 Apr 2009

    oups

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  16. gaspard.leon Posted 6:44 pm
    29 Apr 2009


    Interesting reading, a good summarization of the commercial farming problem:
    http://grain.org/articles/?id=48

    A quote from the story above: "It should be noted that a common ingredient in industrial animal feed is "poultry litter", which is a mixture of everything found on the floor of factory poultry farms: fecal matter, feathers, bedding, etc"

    good way to mix pig and bird flu strains?

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  17. Former Ag Teacher Posted 7:04 pm
    29 Apr 2009

    Face it Tom, you are having to back peddle on your speculation in the first article.  You jumped the gun and reported things without checking facts. This article from the Washington Post is a much better source of information than you hyperbolic diatribe.http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/28/AR2009042804041.html

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  18. Former Ag Teacher Posted 7:16 pm
    29 Apr 2009

    You can't go by the colors in the photos you posted.  They aren't true color.They are very interesting photos and anyone looking at them will learn something.  But the information is very subject to interpretation.For instance, when I look at the photos, I see a lot of crop land around the pork facilities.  That is where they should be, so that the nutrients can be recycled to produce crops.

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  19. Former Ag Teacher Posted 7:30 pm
    29 Apr 2009

    Don't believe everything you read, especially on websites that are promoting an agenda.In the United States, poultry litter in not a common ingredient in animal feed, "industrial" or otherwise. FDA Announces Ban on Feeding of Poultry Litter Livestock Update, March 2004   www.ext.vt.edu/news/periodicals/livestock/aps-04_03/aps-318.htmlI doubt that litter is used in animal feed in Mexico, although I don't have experience  and haven't looked for references to back up my contention.

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  20. Russ Walker's avatar

    Russ Walker Posted 8:04 pm
    29 Apr 2009

    If you haven't seen it yet, Grist has posted a thoughtful critique of Tom's writing about swine flu and industrial pork production. You can find the story here:http://www.grist.org/article/2009-04-29-swine-flu-pork-farm-reax/

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  21. x99x's avatar

    x99x Posted 9:47 pm
    29 Apr 2009

    Tom!  I am practically dead of appreciation for your work.  I've been ploughing around for days and coming up with the identical stuff, and linking big blots of chaos in posts on my blog, expecting everyone to follow my reasoning, and now this is the THIRD time I've landed here to find you brilliantly expressing what I've already found and spluttered/splattered about on my blog.  If nothing else, and I can tell there's plenty else, you have saved me from going comatose with exasperation.I'm so grateful for you I even let the hated cookies onto my computer to sign up here.  I'm pathologically anti-cookie... actually anti-login as well... but my appreciation and admiration have overcome even my strongest phobias, and I will be forced now to engage with this blog because I can't ignore anyone who has given me some relief from such a crippling load of frustration.It bothers me to see people suggesting your thesis isn't scientific, how far out into improbable they will reach to avoid an almost completely inescapable and rational conclusion.  For instance, I am so glad you cited something about flies as vectors, even though they have been known to carry viruses and bacteria for a long time.  People don't seem willing to cede that those itty feet actually transfer itty pathogens, be they fairly harmless or deadly.Oh, I could go on and on, but, really, what I want to say is:  THANK YOU.

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  22. CowsEatGrass's avatar

    CowsEatGrass Posted 8:46 am
    30 Apr 2009

    Livestock should be produced near crops, preferably on the same farm.  However, they should NEVER be produced in confinement ANYWHERE.

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  23. SRoach Posted 12:31 pm
    30 Apr 2009

    While the FDA announced a ban on the feeding of poultry litter in 2004 they backed away from it very quickly and never published a rule that would have put it in place. If you look at the final rule passed last year it makes clear that poultry litter feeding is allowed in the US. http://edocket.access.gpo.gov/2008/pdf/08-1180.pdfIn 2005, when the FDA proposed the rule they estimated that between 20% and 36% of litter was fed to cattle as part of the cost analysis of a ban on litter. In 2006, when the Harvard Center for Risk assessment added poultry litter feeding to its risk assessment model on BSE they suggested that 1% was the correct figure. So for the FDA when calculating the cost of a ban use 36% of litter but when assessing the risk use 1%. This type of behaviour does not inspire much trust. 

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  24. CowsEatGrass's avatar

    CowsEatGrass Posted 2:57 pm
    30 Apr 2009

    Certified Organic livestock may not be fed any animal parts or manure.

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  25. Bud Dingler's avatar

    Bud Dingler Posted 6:36 pm
    30 Apr 2009

    http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124105320874371313.html?mod=googlenews_wsj  " Mexico's top government epidemiologist said Wednesday that it is "highly improbable" that a farm in the Mexican state of Veracruz operated by Smithfield Foods Inc. is responsible for the nation's swine-flu outbreak.Miguel Ángel Lezana, the government's chief epidemiologist, said in an interview that pigs at the farm are from North America, while the genetic material in the virus is from Europe and Asia."  In my view Grist has devolved into a tabloid of sensational news stories that seek to rip any corporate entity thats involved in food.  

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  26. gristle Posted 4:32 am
    04 May 2009

    And now we have pigs in Canada who've caught the flu from a human who caught it in Mexico...http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2009-05-03-canada-flu_N.htm But of course that's technically impossible given the big oceanic voids in our heads, especially in those government officials who are likely on Smithfield's [un]official payola-roll. Huge food corporations have made their own beds. It's only recently the crap has started seeping through the layers they've built up with all the covers.

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  27. wkyih Posted 3:41 pm
    06 May 2009

    Thanks for this nice analysis, Tom.  I agree with the overall argument that intensive, concentrated production of pigs and poultry facilitates the spread of disease and the emergence of new strains of influenza, some of which can infect and spread in humans.  However, the claim of transmission via pig feces is a little shaky, I think.  The tidbit you provided about flies vectoring H5N1 influenza in Kyoto in 2004 isn't directly relevant.  Avian influenza is an infection of the birds' GI tract, which is why you'd expect to find virus in feces of infected birds.  In pigs, influenza is a respiratory illness.  I suppose you could get SOME influenza virus mixed in with the feces by sheer happenstance if you had hundreds of pigs infected, but probably not much.  

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