Not hogging the H1N1 spotlight: A “state of the art” pig CAFO in Georgia.Photo courtesy of USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service.“When respiratory viruses get into these confinement facilities, they have continual opportunity to replicate, mutate, reassort, and recombine into novel strains ... The best surrogates we can find in the human population are prisons, military bases, ships, or schools. But respiratory viruses can run quickly through these [human] populations and then burn out, whereas in CAFOs—which often have continual introductions of [unexposed] animals—there’s a much greater potential for the viruses to spread and become endemic.”
—Gregory Gray, director of the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases at the University of Iowa College of Public Health, quoted in “Swine CAFOs & Novel H1N1 Viruses,” Environmental Health Perspectives, September 2009, by Charles W. Schmidt.
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Almost exactly six months ago, I caused a stir by suggesting a possible link between CAFOs and the new strain of H1N1 swine flu that had just broken out. (See here and here.)
My position generated a certain amount of outrage, even among some commentators not linked to the meat industry. How dare I point to a possible link based on indirect, circumstantial, evidence?
Half a year later, I would love to be able to review results of a rigorous set of tests on CAFOs. I wish I could report that USDA researchers had been showing up on hog confinements and taking swabs; that CAFO workers were being monitored for H1N1 infections or antibodies; that the EPA was looking hard at CAFO cesspools—known as lagoons—to see if they could be possible vectors of infection.
From what I can tell, though, none of that is happening—even with the novel H1N1 virus spreading rapidly and vaccines still in short supply.
Check out this jaw-dropping Washington Post article from last weekend. Reporter David Brown buried his lead—more on that below—but here’s the bombshell:
The search for influenza in pigs [on CAFOs] has actually decreased in the six months since the H1N1 strain was discovered in California and Mexico in April. Diagnostic labs in Minnesota, Kansas and Iowa report a decline in samples submitted by veterinarians; the lab at Iowa State University recently eliminated three positions because of “decreases in overall case revenue.” [Emphasis added.]
Did you get that? Since the global flu pandemic broke out, testing of pigs for H1N1 has dropped. Why? Here’s the Post:
Most American pig farmers—who have been losing money since the fourth quarter of 2007—don’t want to know whether the new strain is in their herds. ... “People are really scared if their farm is the first one to find an outbreak of pandemic H1N1,” said ... [a] Kansas State microbiologist. “They are afraid they will lose their livelihood.”
A “state of the art” cesspool at a hog confinement in Georgia. “The facility is completely automated and temperature controlled,” the NRCS reports. Photo courtesy of USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service.Okay, so no individual hog grower has an interest in knowing whether a particular confinement house is incubating novel strains of swine flu. I can understand that. As I’ve written before, the industry is hyper-consolidated; four companies slaughter and process 65 percent of the hogs raised in the United States. Farmers operate under such tight profit margins—and often, as now, negative profit margins—that swine flu becomes just another threat to their fragile livelihoods.
Thus we’ve got a gaping market failure on our hands; the industry has demonstrated its inability to regulate itself on this issue.
Given the vast public-health threat, one might expect the government to step in and perform tests. Is it happening? Stunningly, no. All the USDA has done is to create a voluntary program—which, as noted above, no hog grower has an interest in using.
Well, if no one’s testing the hogs, someone must be testing the workers, right? You know, the people who come into contact with the hogs daily, breathe in air full of their fecal particles and breath exhalations, and then head into the surrounding community?
Wrong again. In fact, the government has thus far even declined to make CAFO workers a “priority group” for H1N1 vaccines, the Post reports.
Well, maybe I’m being alarmist. Maybe there’s no rational reason to suspect that the practice of confining thousands of animals into buildings over their own waste gives novel viruses a wonderful habitat in which to flow from host to host, mutate, and jump species to humans. Maybe the industry’s much ballyhooed safety efforts, in which hog confinements are treated like biosecurity time bombs, are successfully keeping pigs and the workers who watch over them from swapping virus strains.
But that’s simply not the case, according to the Post piece. Are CAFO conditions keeping swine free of swine flu? No. “A survey done in 2006 found that 58 percent of pig farms had at least one animal with antibodies to influenza,” the Post reports. Moreover, there have been several instances of swine herds testing positive for the current novel strain. For example:
Scientists at the University of Minnesota and the University of Iowa revealed last week they had identified the H1N1 strain in seven pigs at the Minnesota State Fair in late summer as part of a study of virus exchange between swine and people. Some of those animals may have caught the bug from the hordes of visitors at the 12-day event. But not all: One infected animal was swabbed while being unloaded and almost certainly arrived with the virus.
Now, let’s think about this. These were randomly selected animals tested as part of a study, and not obviously sick ones a farmer brought in for testing. If a random study picked up novel H1N1 among CAFO pigs, how many more out there, among the 20 million-strong U.S. swine herd, also have it?
Well, perhaps CAFO conditions aren’t actually conducive to the generation of new strains. Wrong again. The Post:
[I]f multiple flu viruses were to get into a CAFO, the crowding of the animals would make widespread transmission, and the chance of reassortment, likely. Mathematical modeling suggests CAFOs can function as “amplifiers” of pandemic strains.
Oh dear. Well, maybe the factory style of hog rearing creates a barrier between infected swine and their human handlers. But again, no. Here’s the Post:
In 2006, a team of researchers at the University of Iowa examined blood samples from 111 [hog] farmers, 65 veterinarians and 97 meat-processing workers, and compared them with 79 university employees and students who had no contact with pigs. The scientists looked for antibodies to two common swine influenza viruses. They found that 17 to 20 percent of farmers and 11 to 19 percent of veterinarians had evidence of previous infection by the two strains. None of the meatpackers or students did.
And those who do pick up swine flu from the swine they have contact with are fully capable of passing it on. “Another study by the same research team found that the wives of half of infected pig farmers had the antibodies—suggesting that person-to-person transmission of the viruses was possible,” The Post adds.
So, amid the scramble to mass-produce a vaccine, factory swine farms are indisputably a major possible source of novel viruses—and there’s virtually no organized effort to scrutinize them. The best analogy I can think of is this: A town full of suspected arsonists with access to gasoline and matches has an outbreak of mysterious fires. In response, the town dismisses its cops and beefs up its fire department.
The question becomes, why is the government failing so willfully to investigate the possible link between CAFOs and the outbreak of a novel swine flu? I think we can find a clue in the very Washington Post article under discussion. For all the important and damning information contained in it, it opens on a CAFO, which it describes as a paragon of biosafety.
It may be crowded and carpeted in manure, but the long, white building beside State Route 38 is one of the most pathogen-free homes a pig could have.
Really? Several paragraphs later, we get this: “CAFOs such as Schott’s are inherently safer than backyard pig farms, where the animals mingle with people and birds fly overhead.” In an otherwise lavishly sourced article, there’s absolutely no scientific evidence presented to back up this claim.
My thesis is this: the pork industry is so powerful and entrenched that the Post didn’t dare publish such an explosive article without these spurious hedges about the “inherent” safety of CAFOs.
And the same factor has the federal government scrambling to put out fires, while willfully ignoring a key arson suspect.
My guess is that the CAFO system would not survive a rigorous public-health assessment. If federal authorities began to seriously examine the risk-reward balance between cheap pork and novel flu pandemics, cheap industrial pork would start to look like a pretty trivial reward. But that would lead to the collapse of a multi-billion dollar industry—and a bitter fight with the corporate giants—Cargill, Smithfield, and Tyson—that dominate the pork trade.
From the start of the outbreak, USDA chief Tom Vilsack has cravenly leapt to the defense of the swine industry. Check out this Wall Street Journal article from May—the early days of the crisis.
While Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack says there is “no evidence” of the new swine flu in U.S. pigs, the federal government doesn’t aggressively search for it on farms.
Mr. Vilsack’s statement is designed to bolster the Obama administration’s argument that U.S. consumers and trading partners haven’t any reason to shy away from eating U.S. pork. But the observation isn’t based on any extensive sampling program of the sort that is used by the federal government to alert it to other animal diseases, such as mad-cow disease and bird flu.Indeed, only in recent months has the Agriculture Department begun organizing a federal pilot program for screening pigs for flu. And that move came at the prodding of officials at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. CDC officials have been worried that pigs might serve as a “mixing vessel” for a flu virus capable of sweeping through the human population. The pilot program has yet to begin to collect samples. [Emphasis added.]
Well, as novel swine flu continues its rapid spread, things have evidently changed little with regard to the USDA’s zeal to track down the source of swine flu.
If the Post article opens with a bow to the pork industry, it closes on a chilling note:
Most of the flu viruses already in American pigs contain genes derived from human, pig and bird strains. Such mongrelized viruses, scientists believe, are more likely than others to reassort again, setting the stage for another pandemic.
And the place they’ll likely do it, it seems reasonably clear, is within CAFOs.
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Comments
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foodprovider Posted 8:42 am
29 Oct 2009
To this date, I am only aware of 1 case of H1N1 actually found in swine. That was 1 pig in Minn which it was reportedly spread to by human contact. This was a show pig, not a pig in a group of other pigs, or as some would call it, a CAFO. Most of the spreading of diseases from animals to humans in recent history were from unsanitary conditions, such as people living with their animals.
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Tom Philpott Posted 9:10 am
29 Oct 2009
Scientists at the University of Minnesota and the University of Iowa revealed last week they had identified the H1N1 strain in seven pigs at the Minnesota State Fair in late summer as part of a study of virus exchange between swine and people.
Some of those animals may have caught the bug from the hordes of visitors at the 12-day event. But not all: One infected animal was swabbed while being unloaded and almost certainly arrived with the virus, said Gregory C. Gray, a physician and epidemiologist at the University of Iowa who helped run the study.
And of course, not being "aware" of more instances is meaningless, until widespread testing has been conducted.
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jonnyappleseed Posted 6:27 pm
03 Nov 2009
" The H1N1 virus first emerged around the time of the pandemic of “Spanish flu,” which infected one-third of the world’s population and killed up to 100 million people between 1918 and 1920. During the later stages of that pandemic, farmers noticed that pigs also were getting sick with the malady scientists at the time called “hog flu.” Hog flu was reported intermittently in the Midwestern United States long after the human pandemic ended. In 1930, Richard E. Shope, while working at The Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, identified the cause of the animal illness: the influenza virus now known as H1N1, named in reference to its hemagglutinin (H) and neuraminidase (N) surface proteins."
...meaning that H1N1 existed long before CAFO's.
And:
" One thing that’s certain is that no one can say exactly where the pandemic strain evolved, says Silbergeld. Moreover, its origins can’t be determined retrospectively, given how fast influenzas mutate as they pass from host to host.
In the absence of publicly available sampling data, speculation about the origins of the current pandemic have run rampant. In April 2009, bloggers including Tom Philpott, writing for the environmental website Grist, and David Kirby, for the Huffington Post, created a stir when they pointed a finger at Mexican CAFOs run by Smithfield Foods subsidiary Granjas Carroll de México. Each year these CAFOs raise some 950,000 hogs on 16 farms along the border of the Mexican states of Veracruz and Puebla. One such CAFO lies about 5 miles outside the town of Perote, home to the pandemic’s first reported case. Philpott cited as evidence newspaper interviews with Perote residents, who claimed infectious pollution from the CAFO had sickened the 5-year-old victim, a boy who later recovered. Those claims were never scientifically confirmed, however, and Mexican officials later identified another case from a different part of the country who could have been infected as early as February."
It's a pretty good article, and deserves to be read in its entirety. I'm not sure what Mr Philpotts point is - although I suspect that it is we should eliminate CAFOs. That's fine with me. And, let's eliminate sub-therapeutic antibiotic doses as well. Fine, as long as the American public will pay 3x (an educated guess) more for their meat. (And we'll still have flu season...)
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elizahleigh Posted 9:06 am
29 Oct 2009
How To Prevent and Recognize Symptoms Of Swine Flu http://www.greenwala.com/community/videos/all/1069-How-To-Prevent-and-Recognize-Symptoms-Of-Swine-Flu
How To Fight The H1N1 Virus (AKA "Swine Flu") http://www.greenwala.com/community/videos/all/1138-How-To-Fight-The-H1N1-Virus-AKA-Swine-Flu
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Clifford Wells Posted 2:39 pm
29 Oct 2009
The main fact is, humans are the best vector for spreading the common cold, influenza. In fact, since swine flue mimics the common flu so much, we really don't know how much swine flu there is.
But consider this Tom - the pig is out of the bag, so to speak, and the disease is rampant in 47 states. So what now, you want to kill all the pigs and the CAFOs for vengeance? That has to be the most stupid logic I have ever heard.
Naw you should kill all the people, Tom, then you wouldn't have this nasty problem, and the animals could be free and happy.
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Kiara Posted 7:45 pm
29 Oct 2009
It would be nice if, instead of bickering over fine points of dialogue, we could all recognize that the current industrial meat production is less than ideal and is making more and more customers turn away from the supermarket meat counters.
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foodprovider Posted 8:27 pm
29 Oct 2009
Unfortunately, some in media like to exagerate things for sensationalism, or too further their own ambitions and motives. I'm not saying that the H1N1 virus is not serious, it is, just like any other flu outbreak. To repeat my 1st post, There has only been 1 confirmed case of H1N1 being found in swine, and that was suspected of being transmitted to the pig by a human, not the other way around.
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Clifford Wells Posted 8:36 pm
29 Oct 2009
Calm down and realize that I have a particularly dry sense of humor - I mean come on, kill all the people so we wouldn't have all these flu problems?
Pig flu. Really it should be called H1N1 because although there were some porcine antecedents, and Tom did a great job of covering Virginia and Mexico probable outbreaks and now some Minnesota information, it's just a common cold that modified its genetics a little, no telling if birds or toads were involved in the process.
But I will not tolerate people using such things as proof that all animal slaughtering should be banned because you want the world to go vegan, on some vague moralistic and climate change grounds you cannot prove.
Listen, my sister is one one the leading epidemiologists in the US now, and her point is that people act so stupid during a pandemic, such as refusing inoculation shots or nasal sprays, and trying to blame Big Corporate Meat on all our problems. Both turn out to be some really whacky religious people that have no sense. She would never write that. But 73 percent of people in Michigan refuse to get shots for target groups like babies, simply because they're stupid.
Just how many pigs do you want to kill and do you have a method for disposing them? LOL, I can see the responses now! Hey beat me, cuss me, spank me, but don't infect me, beotch!
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foodprovider Posted 9:07 pm
29 Oct 2009
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CyberBrook Posted 9:33 am
30 Oct 2009
Check out http://www.factoryfarming.org for more information.
Also visit Eco-Eating at http://www.brook.com/veg
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muellern Posted 1:52 pm
30 Oct 2009
Tom - one note for clarity: do you know that the MN State Fair pig that had the virus as it was being offloaded actually was the product of a CAFO? Or was it a 4H pig?
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El Dragón Posted 5:49 am
31 Oct 2009
http://www.kare11.com/news/news_article.aspx?storyid=827507
But I don't think that fact undermines the rest of Tom's argument, namely, that for an ongoing source of flu problems, we have to examine the international live-swine trade, which is a river of stressed out animals and scrambling flu viruses.
For a similar take on a similar virus, look at the 2006 GRAIN study of avian flu.
http://www.grain.org/briefings/?id=194
During bird flu's hyped up craziness, noted epidemiologist Michael Osterholm made the argument that wild birds were to blame for the spread of bird flu. The fact is that bird flu has spread, not on north-south migratory patterns, but in east-west trade patterns. (In that case, really, it's both -- wild and domestic birds infecting each other, with large and small poultry farms acting as reservoirs for viruses). That virus spread from Indonesia west into Africa, along industrial-scale poultry trade routes, instead of north into Alaska, and down into the States with migratory birds.
We have no reason to believe the pig trade is any different -- a virus in one CAFO is likely to be found in another from which the swine in question was purchased.
Along with increased testing, though, Tom, we need also heightened tracking if we're going to ship immune-compromised livestock all over the planet. It's waaaaay too easy for the industry to mask outbreaks internally, especially in countries like Mexico.
Which is why, if Smithfield CAFO in Mexico did contribute in any way to that tragic outbreak, we'll probably never know.
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jonnyappleseed Posted 5:18 pm
03 Nov 2009
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jonnyappleseed Posted 5:27 pm
03 Nov 2009
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jnewton Posted 3:13 pm
03 Nov 2009
The meat byproducts which did cause the BSE were hidden in a cocktail of feed sold to farmers. Why were they in there? Because they were cheap. No farmer would knowingly feed meat to his cattle.
Cattle are ruminant herbivores. They should eat nothing but grass and a bit of hay.
There are two points to make here
1. The crowding of animals is unhealthy and unnatural. Unhealthy for the animals and eventually us.
2. The reason they sre crowded is that we est too much meat. Let's eat less mest and pay more for well and more humanely raised animals. Eat half as much, pay twice as much
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El Dragón Posted 7:18 am
06 Nov 2009
My point is that global transport of live animals means a risk of globally transporting flu. Live chicks used as feeder stock are transported through the United Nation's FAO poultry programs -- that's my own pet theory about the spread of avian flu H5N1. As the outbreak popped up in Turkey and throughout Africa, the countries impacted read like an FAO client list (Turkey is a major FAO supplier of day-old chicks to African nations).
Regardless of how and why live hogs are transported globally, quarantines are very limited in effectiveness. Smithfield imported enough livestock for 33 hog CAFOs in Romania in 2006, and, later, suffered an outbreak of classical swine flu that spurred a cull of 50,000 pigs and the shuttering of 20 farms. Did the company transport the virus with their hogs, or was the virus contracted in Romania?
We'll never know. Smithfield guards literally pushed Romanian veterinary health officials away at the CAFO gates.
I agree with Tom that we need laws about practices on CAFOs, heightened tracking and transparency being major parts of that.
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