Swine-Flu origins Far From Kosher

"No matter what you call it, the virus that is scaring the world is pretty much all pig." So say the world's leading geneticists and epidemiologists. "If it looks like a pig and smells like a pig-- it's a pig" says Dr. Raul Rabadan, professor of computational biology at Columbia University.

It did not take long for the big swine herders to go oink! Pure slander the corporate suits cried! -- and with their reliable ethical compass our noble government and the WHO sided with the deep pockets. Science be damned--the current scourge is officially to be known as the H1N1 influenza.

Not that any of this gets to the bottom of the sloppy matter. Here we can rightly sympathize with the injured swine-- it's not the poor pig's fault that his makeup is almost human-- or that even though more of us crave his sweet, fatty flesh we continue to raise him in the most appalling, unsanitary conditions.

Here's what we know: certain animal diseases called "Zoonoses" are communicable to humans. Their transmitting agents can be protozoal, fungal, bacterial, chlamydial or viral. Our own susceptibility will vary depending on our age and the strength of our immune system, which in turn depends upon our environment.

(A note about Chlamydiosis) the infection is primarily transmitted by inhalation of contaminated fecal dust and is spread by carrier birds, which act as the main reservoirs for the disease. The organism is excreted in both the feces and nasal secretions. A carrier state can persist for years. The organism survives drying, which facilitates oral spread and allows transmission on contaminated clothing and equipment. Chlamydiosis can be transmitted bird to bird, feces to bird, and bird to human-- (or bird to pig to human)

Pig chlamydiosis is antrophozoonosis caused by Chlamydophila abortus. Chlamydias(C type) are widely found in nature and can infect humans, domestic and wild mammals, and 139 types ofbirds.

Knowing that-- it comes as no great surprise that the latest swine flu outbreak has been deadliest around a giant corporate pig and chicken farm in Perote, Mexico. What's surprising is that this current epidemic did not occur sooner. Here's what Rolling Stone wrote about Smithfield Farms back in 2006:

Smithfield's pigs live by the hundreds or thousands in warehouse-like barns, in rows of wall-to-wall pens. Sows are artificially inseminated and fed and delivered of their piglets in cages so small they cannot turn around. Forty fully grown 250-pound male hogs often occupy a pen the size of a tiny apartment. They trample each other to death. There is no sunlight, straw, fresh air or earth. The floors are slatted to allow excrement to fall into a catchment pit under the pens, but many things besides excrement can wind up in the pits: afterbirths, piglets accidentally crushed by their mothers, old batteries, broken bottles of insecticide, antibiotic syringes, stillborn pigs -- anything small enough to fit through the foot-wide pipes that drain the pits.

Taken together, the immobility, poisonous air and terror of confinement badly damage the pigs' immune systems. They become susceptible to infection, and in such dense quarters microbes or parasites or fungi, once established in one pig, will rush spritelike through the whole population. Accordingly, factory pigs are infused with a huge range of antibiotics and vaccines, and are doused with insecticides.

Then there's the problem of what to do with all that waste. A pig produces three times more shit than a human and the corporate giant raises about 950,000 pigs each year just in tiny Perote, Mexico. Residents there have no problem spotting the culprit and municipal health officials state that their investigations indicate that the disease vector may have been the flies that reproduce in the pig waste, waste that continues being dumped into Mexico's lakes and rivers.

But of course the WHO is loathe to jump to any conclusions-- better to warn us to wash our hands just in case there's a deadly pandemic. Just don't blame it on the poor little pigs-- or those giant mega-farmers willing to kill off half the planet just to bring home more bacon.