Photo: Kat... via FlickrConsider the weasel: so unassuming, even sweet -- on the outside. But put them near their prey and watch out! I've got weasels on my mind, of course, thanks to Ohio Issue 2, which goes before voters tomorrow. Issue 2 is the Ohio livestock industry's attempt to head off restrictions on their worst practices, such as tail docking, battery cages and gestation crates, and, purely coincidentally I'm sure, to keep the Humane Society of the United States from doing in Ohio what they've done in California, Michigan, Florida and Colorado just to name a few -- either through the ballot box or negotiated executive order, change the way factory farms raise their animals. Fiendishly clever in its construction, Issue 2 would create a new commission called the Livestock Care Standards Board to regulate livestock farming techniques. It sounds so reformist! There would even be consumer and human society representation. How unassuming, even sweet -- on the outside.

Indeed, once you take a good look at Issue 2, you see how truly weaselly it is. Eleven members of the 13 member board would be appointed by the governor (who also appoints the chairman). While spaces would be reserved for those consumer and humane society representatives, as well as for family farmers (who may also be large-scale factory farmers), the Ohio Farm Bureau Federation itself would not have underwritten at least $500,000 of the estimated $5 million Issue 2 campaign [PDF] if there were not a clear understanding of whose interests would ultimately prevail.

But far worse for Ohioans than the board's makeup will be its influence. Issue 2 would write the LCSB into the Ohio State Constitution, rather into than the legal code -- no half measures for Big Ag! Why would this be a problem? The group Ohio Against a Constitutional Takeover explains (via PDF):

The Livestock Care Standards Board, once cemented into the state constitution, would have the power to override any act by the Ohio Department of Agriculture or the state legislature, or any other initiative or referendum brought before the Ohio public other than an additional constitutional amendment. In effect, this means that any standard created by the Board is a final decision, giving it unchecked power over animal agriculture.

Nothing like the exercise of little raw power to put a spring in an industry's step. To be clear, this board would have sole and supreme authority -- it would take "self-regulation" to a ridiculous extreme. Again, short of amending the state's constitution (which is more difficult than simply passing a referendum), voters, along with the state ag department and the state legislature, would lose any ability to control the livestock industry. They could, quite simply, do as they please.

The sad fact is that, in a low-turnout off-year election like tomorrow's, the odds of passing this ludicrous amendment are surprisingly good. Yes, newspapers across the state both large and small are opposed. Groups from Farm Aid, to the Ohio Farmers Union to Food and Water Watch, and the Center for Food Safety have stated their opposition as well. But that durn LCSB sounds so professional and reform-minded! Why not just trust it?

Make no mistake, this is not just Ohio's problem. Should this bit of governmental legerdemain succeed, a similar commission will likely be coming to a state near you. Big Ag isn't even pretending it's a one-off. Having been embarrassed at the polls in state after state when it's gone up against the Humane Society, Big Ag is trying not so much to take but to steal Ohioans' ball and go home. Let's hope they fail.

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Having read and listened to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack's attempts at ground beef-related damage control in the wake of the recent food safety revelations, I'm left to wonder if the USDA simply needs to get out of the food safety business entirely.

Vilsack himself -- in a Minnesota NPR radio interview where he defended the USDA's dual role as a marketing service and a food safety regulator, its recent shift towards more aggressive testing, and its ability to inspect foreign meat importers -- all but admitted that the USDA has fundamentally failed in its mission. How so? The interviewer asked him one final question:

Q: Can you assure ... our listeners that ground beef is safe?

A: I can assure you that we are doing everything we possibly can to make sure that that product is safe through our testing, through our inspectors ... I will say also that there is still work to be done to continue to improve what we do and until we get the number of food-borne illnesses down to zero and the number of hospitalizations down to zero and the number of death down to zero, we’ll still have work to do.

Please note that he did not say "Yes, I can."

And if you look at the proposals Vilsack highlighted in yesterday's late evening statement, they're mostly focused on increased vigilance, testing, and tracking systems to find the hundreds of thousands of pounds of infected beef the industrial food system produces. Given the ability of the meat industry to use its influence, access, and power within the USDA to scale back any attempts to affect core issues like livestock farming methods, slaughterhouse line speed, and processors' procurement practices, it's hard to deny that its role as an industry cheerleader has left it hopelessly compromised.

Which is just how the meat industry likes it. It was only a few months ago that Big Meat used its allies on the House Ag Committee to beat back an attempt to include greater FDA oversight of meat, eggs, and poultry in the food safety legislation pending before Congress. The argument at the time was that the FDA didn't have the "expertise" to assess food safety practices regarding livestock -- but it was clearly all about the industry maintaining its firm grip on its regulator of choice, the USDA. With any luck, this argument will ring a bit hollow when the Senate takes up food safety legislation (assuming it ever does -- there is no Senate food safety bill at the moment).

But it's not just the meat industry that is using the USDA to shield itself from more rigorous FDA oversight. The current food safety disaster in ground beef is on the verge of being replayed over our vegetables. Elanor Starmer at the Ethicurean has a must-read three-part report (1, 2, 3) on hearings in California on a proposal by largescale industrial growers for a so-called "National Leafy Green Marketing Agreement." Ostensibly, the proposal is designed to cut down on the potential for E. coli contamination of leafy greens. But, in addition to documenting the proposals many flaws (including the fact that the NLGMA appears to ignore the true source of E. coli contamination of vegetables, i.e. industrial livestock farming practices), critics are asking what does a USDA Marketing Agreement -- something normally used to guarantee product qualities like taste, texture, color, or shape -- have anything to do with food safety?

The answer is simple and all too familiar.  As one industry rep explicitly admitted, it's all about avoiding FDA regulation over leafy greens -- and to short circuit the bills before Congress that would mandate it. The FDA won't, it seems, "put industry at the table" quite the way the USDA will.

And Starmer provides plenty of evidence of USDA cheerleading over this issue; the USDA representative leading the government's questioning was one of the strongest backers of the NLGMA at the hearing. So much for impartiality.

The fact is, Tom Vilsack is unable to face down Big Meat -- even if he wanted do, he's surrounded by an institution built to protect it. In effect, Big Ag was left in charge of food safety -- and it's been an unmitigated disaster. Who in Washington has the will or the power to change that?

Anyone? Anyone?

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For the past two years, the North Carolina Environmental Management Commission has been crafting new rules to require water monitoring at factory hog farms, a significant source of pollution in the state.

But last week, even with concerns growing over the environmental impacts of hog farms, the North Carolina Senate unanimously passed a bill that puts the rules process on hold until 2011 -- a display of the mighty political power Boss Hog holds in the state.

The measure now moves to the N.C. House, where its fate is unclear.

The bill's sponsor was state Sen. Charlie Albertson, the Democratic Caucus secretary who represents eastern North Carolina's Duplin, Sampson and Lenoir counties, an agricultural center where many of the state's more than 10 million hogs are raised. In a recent interview with WUNC public radio reporter Laura Leslie, Albertson -- a member and former chair of the state Senate Agriculture, Environment and Natural Resources Committee -- accused the EMC of unfairly picking on hog farmers:

Water quality problems, again, are not caused by swine farmers ... It's just not happening.

Unfortunately, that's not true. Agricultural operations, including confined animal feeding operations or CAFOs, are a source of water pollution nationwide, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Hogs produce enormous amounts of fecal waste -- three times as much as humans -- that's stored in giant open-air holding ponds known as "lagoons," which are vulnerable to leaking. The waste is eventually sprayed onto fields, where the nitrogen converts to nitrates, chemicals that move readily into nearby streams and groundwater. Nitrates have been linked to a blood disorder called methemoglobinemia, which is especially harmful to babies.

Animals kept in CAFOs are fed a variety of drugs including antibiotics that also present a threat to the environment. Twenty-two states have reported damage to streams and rivers caused by agriculture, with 20% of that attributed specifically to CAFOs, according to the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production. Health problems have also been documented among people living near hog farms.

In its report released in April, the Pew Commission noted that "one of the most serious unintended consequences of industrial food animal production is the growing public health threat of these types of facilities." 

Overruling the rulemakers

North Carolina, the nation's second-largest hog producer after Iowa, is among the states that have suffered serious environmental problems from industrial livestock operations, one of several significant sources of nutrient pollution along with municipal wastewater and urban runoff. Contamination from the state's factory farms has been linked to outbreaks of Pfiesteria piscicida, a microbe believed to be responsible for fish-killing algal blooms as well as skin irritation and cognitive problems in exposed humans.

In 2007, with concerns mounting over animal waste pollution, North Carolina's Riverkeepers filed a petition for rulemaking asking the state to consider whether it needed to impose monitoring rules for industrial livestock farms. Current law requires the facilities to undergo two inspections a year, but these are strictly visual checks that involve no environmental sampling.

In May of this year, following a process in which all stakeholders got a chance to be heard through comments and hearings, the EMC proposed rules requiring animal waste management facilities to sample water quality three times a year at three sampling sites to be determined by the state Division of Water Quality.

But that didn't sit well with Albertson, who sought to kill the rules. He turned to an existing piece of legislation that aimed to nix state regulation of toxic air emissions in certain cases. That bill was changed to prohibit the EMC from adopting any permanent rules at all until 2011 except in a few limited cases, such as an unforeseen public health crisis. There were as many as 10 rules under consideration at the EMC that would have been affected by this version of the bill.

It was that broad rule moratorium that Albertson got approved by the Senate Agriculture and Environment committee -- a body that has a history of being sympathetic to agribusiness interests. The committee was once chaired by Wendell Murphy, a hog farmer whose Murphy Family Farms are now part of Smithfield Foods of Virginia, the world's largest pork producer and processor. During his time in the legislature, Murphy sponsored and helped pass bills that exempted hog farms from local zoning laws and lawsuits and that gave the industry subsidies and tax exemptions. When Murphy retired from the Senate in 1992, he was replaced by Albertson, then a state representative.

When Albertson's bill was taken up on the Senate floor, several lawmakers with a record of advocating for the environment spoke against the measure. They included state Sen. Dan Clodfelter of Charlotte, who expressed concerns about the bill's impact on rules the EMC was creating to help his city deal with a serious air quality problem. Clodfelter asked Albertson for a narrowing amendment, which Albertson agreed to provide.

Senate insiders say it's customary that when a colleague does what you ask as Albertson did, you in turn support his legislation. That's why even those lawmakers with strong environmental records voted yes on the bill -- even though not all of them wanted to kill the hog farm rules.

At Boss Hog's trough

But other North Carolina senators spoke in praise of Albertson's bill, with some even accusing the EMC of harboring a "vendetta" against hog farmers.

That lawmakers are so sympathetic to a polluting industry is not altogether surprising considering the enormous clout the corporate agriculture lobby has in North Carolina -- influence that's apparent in Albertson's record of campaign contributions.

Since 2000 alone, Albertson has received $10,200 from the N.C. Farm Bureau, $8,000 from Smithfield Foods, another $7,250 from the N.C. Pork Council, and $5,000 from the N.C. Poultry Federation, according to the National Institute on Money in State Politics. He's also received tens of thousands of dollars in contributions from individual hog and poultry farmers, include E. Marvin Johnson, owner of the House of Raeford turkey farms, hog farmer William H. Prestage of Prestage Farms and Murphy, his Senate predecessor.

Albertson's hardly alone among North Carolina lawmakers in benefiting from industrial agriculture's largesse: According to a recent report [pdf] from campaign finance group Democracy North Carolina, the N.C. Farm Bureau contributed a total of $222,150 to state candidates and political parties in the last election alone, and the N.C. Pork Council -- which gets funding for its policy advocacy work from a mandatory fee on pork producers -- chipping in another $187,000.

Legislative insiders say there's now an effort underway to keep Albertson's bill from coming up in the House. However, the industry's considerable influence with lawmakers suggests environmental advocates could face a tough battle ahead.

"Hopefully, Albertson's bill will be seen for what it is when it reaches the House, and the EMC will not be bullied by the swine industry and its surrogates," says Rick Dove of the Waterkeeper Alliance.

(This story originally appeared at Facing South.)

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Since the beginning of climate change legislation this session in Congress it has been clear that big agriculture would not be a part of a cap and trade program.  Yet, while the Waxman Markey bill has been making its way through Congress, the EPA has also been pushing forward its own agenda of climate related regulations, including the mandatory reporting of GHG emissions from factory farms.  Yet, yesterday the House Appropriations Committee undermined this progressive proposed regulation by passing the 2010 Interior and Environment spending bill. An amendment in the bill will prevent the EPA from requiring factory farms to report their GHG emissions--a move that represents a blatant handout to large factory farms.

While climate legislation stalls through Congress, the EPA proposed rule aims to establish at least the basis for regulating GHG emissions- knowing how many we produce and where they come from.  Two weeks ago the comment period ended for the Proposed Mandatory GHG Reporting Rule, which would require American industries to report their GHG emissions, over a threshold of 25,000 tons.  Among the highlights of the proposed rule was the requirement that manure management be considered a reporting category.  As such, large scale concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) more commonly known as factory farms, would be required to report their emissions if they reached the 25,000 ton threshold.  According to the EPA the number of CAFOs in the U.S. that reached this amount was only around 50 of the largest, most intensive facilities in the country.

There have been a lot of questions floating around as to why Americans should care about livestock poop, particularly in the context of climate change and GHG emissions.  While it is little discussed, it is actually quite a significant contributor to GHG emissions.  First and foremost- animal manure and livestock produce methane and nitrous oxide, which are about 23 and 300 times respectively stronger than carbon dioxide.  According to the EPA GHG Inventory, manure is the 5th largest source of methane and the 4th largest source of nitrous oxide in the U.S.  It results in more GHG emissions per year than all cement production and more than twice as many emissions as waste incineration and natural gas systems in the U.S.  It should also be mentioned that enteric fermentation-gases produced from livestock-is the number one source of methane emissions in the U.S.  Combined, manure and enteric fermentation produce about as many GHG emissions as the entire commercial sector's burning of fossil fuel in the United States.  The EPA did not require that enteric fermentation be considered a reporting category in their proposed rule.

The way in which CAFOs pool their manure together is a large part of the problem here.  When stored in pits and lagoons as is typical on factory farms, the manure breaks down anaerobically, in the absence of oxygen, which exacerbates methane emissions.  The EPA has acknowledged that when manures are distributed on pastures as would be typical in a grass-fed animal system, methane production is limited.  Thus, there are proven ways to reduce methane emissions in manure management.

But with the passage of the House Appropriations amendment last night, there may not even be the chance to attempt to reduce GHG emissions from factory farms.  Representative Dicks (D-WA) stated, "A facility of that magnitude and size can well afford to at least report in what the level of methane is," Dicks said. "I think this is something we need to know. Methane is one of the most important gases that we have to deal with if we're going to deal with this issue." Well said.

By preventing the EPA from collecting data from manure systems, the House Appropriations committee is telling the American people that they aren't serious about climate change or the health of rural communities and farmworkers, who must live with terrible odors and noxious gases associated with such facilities.  What is especially disheartening about the move is that it would prevent a much needed better understanding of livestock and manure emissions that would help foster scientific research and effective methods for reducing such emissions.  If Congress is serious about climate change then we need the data to understand our emissions, which will only happen for livestock and manure if the amendment is removed before the final version of the bill.

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Jim Motavalli of E/Environmental Magazine has a piece in Foreign Policy (!) on the difficulties we face in lowering meat consumption on any significant scale:

So how will we become a vegetarian planet? The numbers suggest that we won't stop eating meat simply because it's "the right thing to do." People love it too much. Instead, we'll be forced to stop. By 2025, we simply won't have the resources to keep up the habit. According to the FAO report, 33 percent of the world's arable land is devoted to growing crops for animal feed, and grazing is a major factor in deforestation around the world. It's also incredibly water-intensive. The average U.S. diet requires twice the daily amount of water as does an equally nutritious vegetarian diet, reports the Worldwatch Institute. Meanwhile, there will be more than 8 billion people on this earth, and two-thirds of the world's population will live in water-stressed regions.

There may thus be some irony in the possibility that Africa's meat consumption could head up by necessity as ours heads down. A new report paints a bleak picture for African ag:

Using climate models, they determined that if carbon emissions remain high by 2050, the number of reliable crop growing days would fall below 90 for almost 1 million square kilometers of arid and semi-arid lands in Africa.

With fewer carbon emissions, the number of growing days would still fall below 90 for some 500,000 square kilometers (124 million acres), the study found.

Maize, the most widely grown staple crop in Africa, "will basically no longer be possible" to cultivate with fewer than 90 days to grow, the study said.

Even millet, a staple grain in Africa considered to be a drought-tolerant crop, would be at risk of crop failure in areas unable to meet the 90-day mark, the researchers found., authored by the livestock insitute, admittedly a biases source, paints an interesting picture of the future of agriculture on the African continent.

The study goes on to observe that cattle could still thrive on land too dry and hot for crops. If you pasture them, that is, since the whole point is that you couldn't grow feed grains on that land anymore. Now, I don't take this study's assertion at face value since it was done by the International Livestock Research Institute, which, though funded by governments and the UN (along with other "private sector entities") clearly has in interest in promoting, you know, livestock.

And of course, their analysis for what qualifies as a "reliable crop growing day" would depend on the style of agriculture. Still, there's no denying that Africa is going to get hotter and drier. I don't think you'll see land like that supporting CAFOs, but small-scale, possibly subsistence level, livestock farming may remain common there at the same time as Western prices for meat go through the roof. If nothing else, this is worth some more attention.

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Copenhagen, U.S.A. December 7

Photo illustration by Tom Twigg / Grist

Swine flu: how very two weeks ago.

Sure, H1N1 transmission is "still on the upswing" in the United States, and the World Health Organization warned that as much of a third of the globe's population could eventually catch it, Reuters reported last week.

But the disease is turning out to be little more virulent than the common flu. It resists older anti-viral treatments, but fortunately, new ones like Tamiflu have its number. For now, anyway. "We all pray this remains sensitive to antivirals," CDC chief virologist Rubin Donis recently told Science -- not exactly inspiring confidence.

Thus sensationalist media spotlight on swine flu is beginning to fade. Out of sight, out of mind. In our culture of instant amnesia, the 2009 swine flu outbreak appears to be skulking into the shadows to join such forgotten one-time burning media fixations as the Teri Schiavo and Elian Gonzalez  episodes.

Worrying about future outbreaks, it seems, is for professionals. "Vast amounts of time and resources are being invested in planning for the next influenza pandemic," declares an article published Thursday in the New England Journal of Medicine. If a truly virulent strain breaks out, we'll be glad that public-health professionals are taking the threat seriously.

Yet even as the public-health system "plans for the next pandemic," we as a public have some hard questions to ponder. So-called "triple-reassortant swine influenza viruses" -- containing genetic material from human, swine, and avian genetic strains -- first appeared in 1998, and have been evolving rapidly since. Until very recently, they haven't been very efficient at infecting humans -- and even worse at jumping from human to human. All of that changed this spring in Mexico.

While public health professionals prepare for the next outbreak -- no doubt praying, like the CDC's Donis, that the antivirals being stockpiled remain effective -- what are we doing as a society to make a pandemic less likely? That question leads to the the place where many scientists believe the new H1N1 strain originated: the confined-animal feedlot operation, or CAFO.

A couple of weeks ago, I caused a mini-sensation by pointing out that U.S. pork behemoth Smithfield Foods runs massive hog-rearing operations near the village in Mexico where the swine flu evidently reared up; and that local residents believed the mysterious, virulent flu-like outbreak was tied to flies emanating from the vast cesspools that abut the hog factories (For an excellent on-the-ground report from Mexico, see Steve Fainaru's piece from Sunday's Washington Post). Critics rebuked me, correctly charging that there's no proof linking the Smithfield confinements to the disease -- and added that no visible signs of sickness have been reported within Smithfield's Mexican or U.S. herd. (It's important to note, however, that hogs can carry flu viruses without falling ill -- and the only actual testing being done on Smithfield's Mexico hogs is controlled by the company itself; and that U.S. regulators have no system in place for testing domestic hogs).

We may never know precisely where this version of H1N1 originated -- the "pig zero" in whose body the strain incubated.

But we do know that raising animals by the thousands in tight quarters is a U.S. invention -- one that characterizes close to 100 percent of hog, poultry, and cow fattening. It's a model that's spreading rapidly across the globe, pushed aggressively by U.S.-based multinational meat giants like Smithfield, Cargill, and Tyson. A growing number of scientists is pointing to the factory-style farms as ideal sites for flu bugs and other pathogens to mutate rapidly and spread to human populations via workers.

Read the veterinary literature on swine flu and you get a strong sense of what might be called vaccination treadmill: the hog industry is literally scrambling to generate new vaccines for the rapidly evolving flu strains that sweep through CAFOs. Writing in the Journal of Infectious Diseases [PDF] in 2008, Eileen Thacker and Bruce Janke of Iowa State University paint a stark picture: "A number of genetically diverse viruses are circulating in swine herds throughout the world and are a major cause of concern to the swine industry," they write. "Influenza virus infections in swine and poultry are potential sources of viruses for the next pandemic among humans."

They describe a kind of fast-changing viral alphabet soup flowing through hog confinements:

An increased rate of genetic change has occurred among both H1 and H3 subtypes [since 1998], with multiple genetically and antigenically diverse viruses of both major subtypes (H1 and H3) circulating in swine herds. Recently, there have been reports of H3N1 viruses circulating in Asia and the United States. Even more recently, an H1N1 virus composed of only human influenza virus genes has entered the US swine population. In addition to the influenza viruses described above, which are isolated fairly commonly from US swine herds, H3 and H1N1 avian influenza virus subtypes have been isolated from pigs in Canada, and transmission of human and swine influenza viruses between the two species has been well documented.

The industry tries to stay on top of this highly dynamic situation by vaccinating sows to "to protect young pigs through maternally derived antibodies," the authors note. But "influenza viruses continue to circulate in pigs after the decay of maternal antibodies, providing a continuing source of virus on a herd basis." As the good veterinary scientists they are, the authors end on a bland note: "Control of influenza virus infection in poultry and swine is critical to the reduction of potential cross-species adaptation and spread of influenza viruses, which will minimize the risk of animals being the source of the next pandemic."

Writing in Newsweek, Laurie Garrett, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, took a more blunt approach. Factory-scale animal farming, she writes, creates "the ecology that, in the cases of pigs and chickens, is breeding influenza. It is an ecology that promotes viral evolution. And if we don't do something about it, this ecology will one day spawn a severe pandemic that will dwarf that of 1918."

"Doing something about it," though, is quite a trick. Industrial meat is a vast industry with billions of dollar of investments across the globe. Garrett is arguing that its signature practice of stuffing the same species together by the thousand is creating a vast public-health menace. Surely, the industry can't be expected to roll up and go away--and is predictably enough scrambling to distance itself from the flu pandemic.

For me, the key now is to resist instant amnesia as the current pandemic fades out of the news cycle -- to keep the flu story alive by continuing to investigate the industry's practices and the government's feeble oversight efforts.

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(Another hat tip to the increasingly essential Tom Laskawy.)

In an interview with Science Magazine,  CDC chief virologist Ruben Donis essentially confirmed the reading of the current swine flu strain made by New Scientist: that it evolved from a strain that cropped up in U.S. hog farms in 1998. Both New Scientist and Donis emphasize that what we're talking about is a swine flu -- in direct contradiction of the pork industry's party line. In an interview with me today, David Warner, director of communications at the National Pork Producers Council, repeatedly attributed the outbreak to "human flu, not swine flu." He acknowledged that new strain had swine and avian components, but insisted that the human components dominated; and he denied outright that the hog industry had anything to do with it. So that's the pork industry's take. Here's the assessment of CDC's Donis, as portrayed in this Science interview. 

Q: Is it of swine origin?

R.D.: Definitely. It’s almost equidistant to swine viruses from the United States and Eurasia. And it’s a lonely branch there. It doesn’t have any close relatives.

Q: How about the neuraminidase gene?

R.D.: It has close relatives in Asia. It’s also swine.

Q: The matrix gene?

R.D.: The same as neuraminidase.

Q: So where are avian and human sequences?

R.D.: We have to step back [to] 10 years ago. In 1998, actually, Chris Olsen is one of the first that saw it, and we saw the same in a virus from Nebraska and Richard Webby and Robert Webster in Memphis saw it, too. There were unprecedented outbreaks of influenza in the swine population. It was an H3.

But what about the Asian component? In my interview with the National Pork Producer's Warner, he suggested that the flu had developed primarily in Asia. The CDC's Donis isn't buying that.

Q: What’s the newest part of this strain?

R.D.: Neuraminidase and the matrix are the newest to be seen in North America. They were not part of the team—I talk about flu virus as teams of genes. There are eight players. They have these two new players from Asia.

Q: It suggests a mixing of pigs from North America and Asia.

R.D.: One little detail we haven’t discussed is [that] these Midwestern viruses were exported to Asia. Korea and many countries import from the U.S. Swine flu is economically not such a big deal that many countries don’t check for it.

In other words, the strain stems from from U.S. hog farms in 1998, and has since bounced back and forth between here and Asia.

As Laskawy noted in the above-linked post, Donis doesn't dismiss Smithfield's Granjas Carroll operations in Mexico as a possible source of the outbreak.

Q: What do you think about the pig farm in Veracruz?

R.D.: I don’t know the details. They said they had a huge operation and the workers were not getting sick; that’s what the company claims. The only suspicious thing in that story is this is the largest farm in Mexico. The fact that the index case also is from the area makes it interesting.

He does add one thing that will comfort the pork industry.

Q: Do large farms have more swine flu?

R.D.: Not really. Even folks who have 50 pigs have to buy feed and supply from vendors that go from farm to farm, and they don’t wash their boots or whatever. Usually the virus is transmitted very effectively.

Fair enough; but when the 50-herd pig operation gets infected, you're created 50 carriers for new evolution. When a 15,000-strong hog confinement catches the flu, well, it's a whole different order of magnitude. Donis ends the interview with the reminder that while the current outbreak seems mild in terms of death rate, medical professionals are doing a lot of finger-crossing.

Q: Is there anything I didn’t ask you that I should have?

R.D.: We all pray this remains sensitive to antivirals. We all hope that vaccines will be developed. The virus doesn’t grow very well in eggs. We hope the virus will improve [the] ability to grow in eggs so we can produce [a] vaccine very quickly so these secondary and tertiary cases can be controlled. In some countries there’s good surveillance, but in others, who knows.

Q: What do you think of this outbreak?

R.D.: This is the first one I’ve seen firsthand as a virologist. The avian influenza outbreak is not comparable because this is unfolding so quickly. This reminds me of SARS. With avian there’s very little transmission. And even with SARS, transmission was far less.

Q: Does this one scare you?

R.D.: I saw figures that do scare you. We’ve received 300 samples from Mexico, and these cover the span of February, March, and April. And you look at flu A, traditionally it’s A/H1 or A/H3 or it's B up until the end of March. There are two or three cases up to [the] last days of March that are swine. Then in April they skyrocket. So all the cases in the D.F. areas, where most samples came from, it really transmits very efficiently.

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In a pair of articles in New Scientist, Debora MacKenzie links the swine flu virus now spreading across the globe to large-scale pork-raising operations in the United States.

In the first article, titled "Swine flu: the predictable pandemic?," MacKenzie writes that the "virus has been a serious pandemic threat for years, New Scientist can reveal -- but research into its potential has been neglected compared with other kinds of flu." She writes that the strain now in the headlines has its origins in an earlier outbreak in the United States a decade ago:

Before '98, MacKenzie claims, a genetically stable swine flu, in the H1N1 family, regularly visited hog farms, not causing much trouble. It was a relatively benign mutation of the strain that caused the great 1918 pandemic. But in 1998, something changed. Citing the work of Richard Webby of St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, MacKenzie writes:

New ScientistWithin a year, the triple-reassortant types became the dominant flu bugs seen on U.S. hog farms. Importantly, "unlike the swine virus they replaced," the new ones "were actively evolving." Today, she writes, "There are many versions with different pig or human surface proteins, including one, like the Mexican flu spreading now, with H1 and N1 from the original swine virus."

Since the mutation that occurred in or before 1998, evidently, the risk of a swine flu pandemic has grown dramatically. At this point, MacKenzie refers to a 2008 paper co-written by USDA livestock specialist Amy Vincent. "The first 80 years of Swine Influenza [i.e., since 1918] remained relatively static, whereas the last decade has become dynamic with the establishment of many emerging subtypes. With the increasing number of novel subtypes and genetic variants, the control of SI has become increasingly difficult and innovative strategies to combat this economically important zoonotic disease are critical," the authors write in the abstract. They continue:

According to MacKenzie, Vincent said last year that the rapid evolution of these post-1998 strains has created "potential for pandemic influenza emergence in North America." MacKenzie also points to a CDC memo from last year warning that swine H1N1 would "represent a pandemic threat" if it started circulating in humans. MacKenzie continues:

The presence of avian genes in the strain are what make it so alarming, MacKenzie writes, "as similar genes are what make H5N1 bird flu lethal in mammals and what made the 1918 human pandemic virus so lethal in people. Despite ample knowledge of the threat among livestock-oriented scientists, there's been shockingly little work among human influenza specialists to prepare for the post-1998 H1N1 strains, MacKenzie claims.

The New Scientist characterization of the current flu crisis is at odds with the position of the U.S. hog industry -- at least superficially. I interviewed David Warner, director of communications at the National Pork Producers Council. He told me that "this particular flu is not in the U.S. swine herd." He repeatedly added that "it's not swine flu," since it's a mixture of avian, human, and swine varieties.

That particular verbal subtlety seems meaningless -- even if President Obama has picked it up. New Scientist and the NPPC agree that the current flu mixes avian, human, and swine strains. The claim that "this particular flu is not in the U.S. swine herd" is actually not inconsistent with the NS analysis, however. If the post-'98 strains have been evolving rapidly and manifesting as different mutations on different sites, then it's perfectly plausible that a strain that grew out of the U.S. post-1998 H1NI family could have mutated in Mexican CAFOs into the one now grabbing headlines. There has been cross-border trade in hogs between the United States and Mexico since the inception of NAFTA in 1994; and, of course, U.S.-based Smithfield's Granjas Carroll subsidiary has been operating down there since 1994.  It wouldn't exactly match strains in the U.S. herd, because of mutations, so the industry could still deny its presence.

I asked Warner to comment on the link made by New Scientist between the strain now causing global panic and the ones that have been evolving for years on U.S. hog farms. He insisted that the current flu "isn't a swine flu, it's a human flu," adding that the World Health Organization and the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture are carefully avoiding calling it swine flu. He then reiterated that "no pig in the U.S. herd has that strain." When I pressed him on the genetic similarity, he said, "look, all flu strains are 'similar,' so what does that tell us?" And he pointed to the Mexican government's claim that a person must have brought the infection to Mexico from Asia.

So what does all of this teach us about the origins of the current outbreak? I inspired a storm of criticism (see reader comments here and here, and journalist Merritt Clifton's critique here) when I pointed out that the first known case of the current swine flu pandemic occurred amid a highly unusual outbreak of contagious respiratory ailments near a large factory hog farm in Mexico; and the public-health community had been warning for years that hog farms posed just such a threat. New Scientist, for its part, is taking the possible connection quite seriously. Pointing out that U.S. pork behemoth Smithfield Foods runs the Mexican operation in question, MacKenzie writes:

In her accompanying piece, titled "Pork industry is blurring the science of swine flu," MacKenzie claims that global and U.S. health officials are "battling to keep this [the outbreak] from harming the pork industry":

She then returns to her central point:

How to explain statements like the recent one from USDA chief Tom Vilsack that "There is no evidence or reports that U.S. swine have been infected with this virus"? MacKenzie says these officials are splitting hairs over small differences.

She adds:

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Editor's Note: Tom Philpott's April 28 piece on the swine flu pandemic, which raised the question of whether there is a link between the virus' emergence in Mexico and the presence nearby of factory-scale pork farms, sparked a vigorous debate on the Society for Environmental Journalists listserv. Merritt Clifton was one of several writers to take issue with Tom's piece. At Grist's invitation, he put his critique into an essay form, which is posted below:

--

Thirty years ago this month I knelt beside the Yamaska River in southern Quebec with a test kit -- downstream from several of the then-largest, factory-type pig farms in North America (which happened to lie upstream from the water intakes for the cities of Farnham and St. Hyacinthe) -- and found that the Yamaska literally contained more extraneous chemicals from pig excrement than H2O.

The predictable happened as the weather warmed. By midsummer thousands of people were ill. My exposés helped to bring the construction of new water filtration and treatment plants--but did not slow the growth of factory farming. Three out of every five Quebec farmers sold out to the mega-conglomerates or were forced out of business during the next 10 years.

Twenty-three years ago this month I was the first volunteer firefighter to arrive at burning factory farrowing barn. Ten minutes ahead of the trucks with the equipment, I found no way to free any sows and piglets before all roasted alive in their steel farrowing crates, squealing in terror and agony.

As a lifelong second-generation vegetarian, and longtime vegan, I would like nothing more, for both humane and environmental reasons, than to see an end to factory farming.

Yet in exposing and attacking the many and often grotesquely obvious excesses of factory farms, I believe it is essential at all times to be fair, be accurate, and not amplify allegations which may be unsubstantiated--not least because amplifying an unfounded or premature allegation tends to erode the credibility of the critic.

As of the moment, about two weeks into formal medical forensic investigation, no one knows just what the source of the mutant H1N1 virus first discovered in the Vera Cruz region of Mexico might have been.

Much attention has been given to the case of five-year-old Edgar Hernandez, of the La Gloria hamlet in Perote, near the Granjas Carroll factory pig farm. Hernandez--who survived--is the earliest victim of the mutant H1N1 virus from whom a sample was preserved. La Gloria residents blamed Granjas Carroll for an outbreak of illness in February and March 2009. Officially attributed to biting flies, the illness produced flu-like symptoms.

Granjas Carroll is half-owned by Smithfield, the world's largest factory pig producer, involved in pollution incidents at multiple sites on several continents. As the mutant H1N1 virus is a variant of an illness that is generically if somewhat inaccurately termed "swine flu," one might be tempted to presume that this disease, often lethal in Mexico, has incubated and emerged as result of the intensely unnatural manner in which Smithfield raises pigs for slaughter.

Prudence dictates waiting for substantial medical evidence. Though the Hernandez sample is the oldest that exists, flu-like illnesses had already been reported throughout the region for weeks. Granjas Carroll, however, reported no unusual disease outbreaks among either pigs or staff. Biting insects associated with pig waste may have infected La Gloria residents with something, but many insect-borne illnesses produce flu-like symptoms, including the malarial and rickettsial disease families, which are of protozoan and bacterial rather than viral origin, and are known to occur in the vicinity.

There are reports that at least one migrant worker returned to La Gloria with a flu-like illness contracted in the U.S., and spread it, before Hernandez fell ill. The nature of influenza is that a new strain may be quite widely distributed before it turns deadly. Often the deadly turn comes in a place where environmental conditions, weather, or a population already weakened by some other disease produce unique susceptibility. La Gloria may be such a place, and the presence of the pig farm may be a factor.

Yet even this would be far from indicting the pig farm for the disease itself, which may have emerged thousands of miles away, and might as easily have arrived with the migrant worker as it appears to have spread outward from Mexico, once people started looking for it.

By then the mutant H1N1 virus might already have been distributed worldwide. But only in the right--or wrong--conditions would it behave differently enough from any other flu to be identified.

Perhaps the migrant worker, or some other person who was the actual Vector One, contracted the disease while working at a U.S. factory farm. Or perhaps Vector One wrapped sandwiches at a fast food restaurant, and picked up the various reassorted "swine flu" strains that comprise this new variant of H1N1 from co-workers who had other versions of common flus.

Until the medical evidence is in, we just don't know. And focusing prematurely on the presumed factory-farm connection could prove a dangerous distraction from identifying and responding to the actual source of a potential pandemic.

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Everything swine and dandy?This intriguing notice posted to the International Society for Infectious Diseases by Columbia University researchers suggests that the current swine flu outbreak may be a "reassortment" (i.e. rearrangement) of existing swine flu viruses and not a swine, avian, and human influenza combo:

We'll see if this analysis holds up and it certainly doesn't guarantee that the outbreak will be any easier to contain, but it does suggest that the current flu -- at the moment -- is not the triple-threat that it was reported to be. Stay tuned...

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Tip #5: Eat your vegetables. Save some moolah (and Ma Earth) by switching out meat for veggies at least one day a week.

Don’t let them sense your fear.Jeremy E.W. Fredericksen via Creative CommonsIt’s tried and true advice, from the USDA to First Lady Michelle Obama to your mom: Eat more veggies. Considering 78 percent of Americans aren’t eating enough fruits and veggies, it sounds like someone isn’t listening. Instead, Americans are chomping away at a record 222 pounds of meat a year (as of 2003). That’s 45 percent more meat a day than the USDA thinks is a very good idea.

Does going veg still have you quaking?  Cutting a little meat out of your diet doesn’t have to be scary. You don’t have to go whole hog to have a healthy impact. (But if you do, you might even like it.)

Consider that eating less meat can:

Did we mention meat is more expensive than alternatives such as legumes and beans, which you can buy in bulk and store practically forever?

Try starting with one of these tasty recipes—or our fave, “Addictive Sweet Potato Burritos”—and make this a weekly ritual for you and your family. Maybe call it ... Meatless Monday.

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Didn’t see Tip #1? Or Tip #2? Or Tip #3? Or Tip #4?

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