Want to read an article about the current H1N1 outbreak from a real journaist who finds unbiased sources?  Try this link.  Flu? Don't blame the pig  H1N1, the so-called swine flu, probably came together thanks to a few unwitting human jet-setters, scientists say http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-sci-swine-pigs9-2009may09,0,4490014.story?page=1

"This is a human virus," Robert Webster, a virologist at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn., and a preeminent expert on influenza.

I was thinking just last night that we keep ignoring all the alarms we've been getting about the harm we're heading for at breakneck speed throwing all things off balance with tax payer supported factoried animals. We will simply have to go through the hell of consequences. At least those who survive it anyway.

Regardless of how conscientious some of us our in our choices and with our knowledge we'll never be able to overcome the greed of the big companies or of those who buy from them. People want a deal despite the costs.

At least there will be records left behind showing that not all of us were stupid or utterly resistant. ^^^^

I can understand being dense and slow to overcome the propaganda of big business but to actively choose ignorance?

But it's not just those whacky vegans and those crazy foodies, there is a certain element of society that thrives on creating a panic.  These people have a slightly different "bad attitude" and simply want to make everyone go home and stay in their rooms.  Of course, you have people like Tom Phillpott that are a combination of the two, as evidenced by his shrill tone and need for self-validation (this isn't about fixing a problem, it's about proving he himself is right!).

The situation was getting so bad that the CDC and government tamped down all the hysteria and mayhem caused by the media and a few shrill food-whackos and scare mongers.  Schools were allowed to reopen.  The UIL sports tournaments were allowed to proceeed.  The media attention "lost some of bloom off the rose."  Now this really makes Alpha-types like Tom real mad, smoking mad.  How dare they pull the plug on all the interest in my story about those horrible CAFOs and stickyards and slaughterhouses?  Well nice try, Upton Sinclair wrote about it back in 1906 in his seminal book, 'The Jungle.'  The injustice, the human slavery, the misery, and yes even the strange sicknesses last right up to this day. 

The fact of the matter is that the article of which we speak did not lay any sound scientific cause-and-effect for swine flu coming from a giant pig farm.  The facts as I know them are that swine flu was discovered several years ago in a hog farm in North Carolina, not somewhere in Mexico.  That swine flue strain modified and skipped geographically, who knows?  The CDC is trying to track it down and some researchers have gotten very close.  The notion that there was a plausible connection and some genetic possibility does not prove a fact using the scientific method, where the null hypothesis must be rejected and all contravening or multi-collinear impacts must be addressed. 

No, what we have here is journalistic license, similar to poetic license.  There was no proof, no smoking gun, no rejected hypothsis, no peer review, no consensus mentioned, just a big fat nice idea:  "it has to be those pig CAFOs."  Dangerous stuff here, man.

Let's put it this way ... if I was a professor at a university or college.  As a journalism professor, I'd give it an "A" because the article was exciting, to the point, and appealed to readers in a visceral way.  If I was a professor of epidemiology, I would have to hand back the article and say "you did not do the assignment, so please have me something Monday morning." Other epi professors might go off the deep end like me.

Respectfully and sorry for all the ho-doo, Clifford "Sam" Wells

CAFO's do not produce food any cheaper than the pastoral farms or any other kind of farm, the bill for cheap food will need to be paid for some day through healthcare costs, environmental damage, and food and water shortages resulting from a food system that collapses from it's concentration and lack of natural diversity.

Those who have worked in and seen the changes in the food system know this.

http://www.naturalnews.com/z025760.html

I don't disagree the possibility is always there for a manmade virus, but both the evidence for and the probability that H1N1 was a purposeful manmade creation is lacking completely in your position and support documents.  If anything your documents contradict your suppositions. Your logic that the H1N1 is just a practice recon for the real thing is - totally illogical. The last thing a true evil doer would do for a bio terror target is to give the target the opportunity of practice sessions in getting better prepared. Not to mention that manmade virus is becoming more and more genetically traceable to their origins - and their developers. For most critical thinkers you are going to have to provide a lot more convincing arguments and better sources than these. Thank you for not wasting my time in trying to find support (not) for your claims. Again, flu virus combinations - swine, avian and human combinations have been coming to us in the US for a very long time via wild duck migratory patterns. They suddenly appear in the US or Canada sometimes near farms sometimes not. As yet, there is nothing that I have seen that shows conclusively that H1N1 did not come about through typical flu type animal, avian, human interactions - whether in Asia or in Mexico - or some other location.

If the NY Times numbers are correct, Smithfield can produce the same number of hogs with 900 people that previously took  424,930 hog farmers (477,030 - 52,100) in Romania (http://www.grist.org/article/2009-05-06-smithfield-globalization) would not that indicate less swine human contact, not more?

People would also probably like to have cheap Caddilacs, but GM has no intention of selling below the cost of production, as is the case with most food. GM has no problem with making a profit at the expense of the environment or moving production out of the US and exploiting workers in developing, non-unionized production facilities, but they still insist on keeping all the profits for the corporation. No cheap Cadillacs.

Bottom line, intensive operations are more profitable only when they have one or more components of the production system that they can exploit, and in so doing, they keep their production costs below the true cost of production,

We must also seperate food production from commodity crop production. Corn that yields 250bu/acre means little in terms of feeding people. Corn that yields  50 bu/acre when planted with squash and beans can produce much more food/acre, Indigenous farmers can feed themselves, their families and their villages. No corn for to sweeten soft drinks, or produce ethanol, but more food per acre.

Cheap food in the US means 20 oz. soft drinks, CAFO produced livestock  and produce grown by underpaid and exploited migrant workers.

Don't tell me it's more efficient, it's more profitable, screw the avoided costs.

Your mixing of the subsistence farming problem with the problem of providing global food stocks only confuses the solution issues. They are separate problems. Subsistence farming even if it were physically possible in all parts of the world, would only provide a very small fraction of the nutrient needs of the world population no matter how large a scale it was practiced on because it's inherently inefficient and mathematically inadequate for the scale of global demand. A very large part of the world population now lives in urban environments where subsistence farming isn't possible because the population density is too high and arable land simply does not exist or the water for it doesn't exist. Another often avoided fact is that a significant portion of the world population lives in marginal habitats, where even the best case subsistence production levels are inadequate. Biafra was a poster child for this subject 40 years ago.

The worlds ugly big secret is that population wise we are far beyond the food production capabilities of subsistence, organic, and or any other "natural" productions methods. Over 95% of world food production is supported by the use petroleum based fertilizer. Take that fertilizer away overnight and there would be global starvation where maybe only 10% of the global human population would survive. When the food goes, so does social order, technology,  science and we would be back to feudal societies (just like Somalia today) almost over night - and non-petro based food production levels would only support the social order and global populations similar to the middle ages. That should tell you something about how precarious world food production is today. We live in world where entire fishery stocks can be wiped out in a couple of fishing seasons - and demand for fish is still not close to being met by fishing. And, where a shift in weather patterns and drought can make entire countries (in Africa) uninhabitable for years. If you really think subsistence farming is going to solve food production problems at this scale, you are either not in possession of the available facts, or simply in denial of them - like most of the world. Do the math for food demand on a global population scale. Much of the world is already in the first stages of a global food shortage - even with factory food production.

I'm not denying that very localized and very qualified small scale food production problems can be solved by substituting a farmers labor in hand picking mixed crops (for mechanized harvesting) to increase per acre food production and nutrient variety over what he does on single crop isn't helpful to him. However, these kind of subsistence farming or organic farming techniques work at such a limited small scale, they are totally inadequate to offset the global food demand. So yes, subsistence farming might help and individual family or even a remote village to improve it's lot beyond what it would have otherwise, but it will do nothing for their millions of urban counter parts. Like it or not, we have reproduced ourselves to a point whereby necessity we now have to use the absolutely most efficient factory food producing processes possible to even come close to meeting global food demand. Let some event interrupt that factory process and a large part of humanity will starve. And yes the environment is and will continue to pay for it - like it does anytime when one species blooms out of control. It's just a matter of time to our population reaches and exceeds all possible ability in satisfying it's food and water needs and the population will collapse, as nature has clearly shown us - over and over.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=13622  The A H1N1 Pandemic: Pig to Human Transmission of the Swine Flu?

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=afrdATVXPEAk&refer=home  Swine Flu May Be Human Error; WHO Investigates Claim

http://www.cattlenetwork.com/Content.asp?ContentID=315081  NPPC:  Novel Flu Strain Not From Smithfield’s Mexican Hog Farm 

WASHINGTON, D.C., May 14, 2009 – Mexico’s agriculture department today said the influenza strain that now has infected almost 4,300 people in 33 countries did not originate from hogs at a Smithfield Foods operation that had been singled out by some, including critics of modern pork production, as the source of the A-H1N1 flu virus.

Test results released today by the Mexican Ministry of Agriculture, Ranching, Rural Development, Fisheries and Food (SAGARPA) confirmed that the novel A-H1N1 virus was not in pigs at the Granjas Carroll de México farm in Veracruz. The pigs also tested negative for other viruses. While the news was welcomed by the National Pork Producers Council, the organization said the damage to the U.S. pork industry from mislabeling the strain “swine” flu has been done.

There are a couple of comments posted above that suggest widespread starvation would occur if CAFO agriculture ended.

I think that suggestion might be a little overwrought.

There are many millions of vegetarians in this world, and their diet would not be affected in the slightest if all meat CAFO’s ceased operation tomorrow.

The millions of vegans among them wouldn’t be affected if the dairy and egg CAFO’s disappeared too.

If the vegetarians and vegans would not notice the loss of CAFO, let alone starve, why would the loss of CAFO cause meat-eaters to starve?

They might be forced to become unwilling vegetarians and learn to fulfil their dietary needs without meat or dairy, and that is a learning challenge that shouldn’t be glossed over, but vegetarians are living proof that the loss of CAFO agriculture needn’t result in anyone’s starvation.

Please note – I’m not looking for a debate about vegetarianism.  I’m just commenting about the claims of imminent starvation.

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Hope this helps…

Then the big factory farms really got going and put a lot of the smaller family farms out of business. That was when things started going downhill. Remember when Willie Nelson and others that went to Washington trying to stop it with Farm Aid?

Sunlight also helps to disinfect things, and while the animals are outside their indoor quarters can be scrubbed down.

I mean, it's nice to have some chicken or fish or a glass of milk now and then, but to think everyone will starve? Not likely.

Well, unless they refuse to eat what's available.