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NOFA/Mass Statement on the Recent Outbreak of "Swine Flu"

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May 4, 2009
Although the current outbreak of swine flu is being treated as an epidemic rather than a food safety problem (you can't get the flu by ingesting infected pork, for instance) it has its roots in the fundamental failure of global production agriculture to raise food in a healthy manner. The increasing reliance of agribusiness on large factory farms and CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations) has time after time resulted in contaminations or disease outbreaks affecting large numbers of people.

The 2006 California spinach contamination event affected thousands of consumers in dozens of states and caused 3 confirmed deaths. The 2007 New Jersey Topps meat episode sickened thirty people in eight states with E. coli infections and caused the recall of over 21 million pounds of hamburger. Now the 2009 swine flu outbreak, apparently originating at a Smithfield pork operation at Granjas Carroll, Mexico, has killed dozens and sickened people around the globe. The common thread among all these events is food production on a massive scale, where a single mistake or viral mutation can quickly grow to tragic proportions and threaten thousands of innocent people with sickness and death.

We think that this tragic history of contamination and infection results from the very scale of these factory farms -- operations of this size simply cannot raise healthy food because their scale precludes it. Healthy food requires living soil, clean water, fresh air, decontaminating sunshine, adequate space for waste products to decompose naturally. None of these can exist under the overcrowded, production-oriented pressures of modern factory farms. To provide them would mean significant new costs that would put the owners at a competitive disadvantage in the global drive to raise cheap food. But that cheap food is coming at a tremendous cost which we cannot longer sustain.

The Immunological Cycle
Epidemics are nothing new. Diseases normally exist in balance with their hosts -- at a threshold level, claiming the old, the sick, and the very young. Epidemics erupt when a new, more virulent strain of an existing disease organism is created by random mutation. For a while that new disease creates havoc. It kills almost every host in sight. But slowly, inexorably, the disease and the host return to a new balance. This is because of two forces.

1) Host biodiversity. The disease kills the hosts most susceptible to it but some hosts, because they are biologically different, have greater resistance to that disease. As the susceptible hosts die off, the resistant ones become a larger portion of the host population and some develop immunity to the disease. Ultimately they come to dominate it and make the host population far less susceptible to attack.

2) Pathogen reproductive needs. The most virulent forms of the disease are the most effective at killing the host. But the organisms that kill a host quickly are trapped in its dead body. It is the organisms that can weaken but not kill a host -- invading it and reproducing in its body, and then escaping it and reaching new hosts -- that will have the most reproductive success. They do this by acquiring transmission methods that let them take advantage of the host's sneezing, coughing, vomiting, and diarrhea, which expel lots of new disease organisms into the environment to sicken other hosts and again reproduce and be expelled to yet more new hosts.

As a result of these two forces, after a period of virulence new strains of a disease return to a state of balance with their hosts. Few hosts any longer die, and the most virulent strains of the disease are killed off without reproducing. Life continues its struggle.

Swine Flu
Influenza viruses are named after their two surface protein components, hemagglutinin (HA) and neuraminidase (NA). H1N1, for instance, is the classic swine flu that has popped up several times this century, including the 1918 pandemic. This new 2009 variety that appears to have come from Mexico contains strains from several classic influenza viruses - swine, bird, and human. This is possible because when two influenza strains infect the same host, the strains can trade segments. Most of these exchanges result in defective offspring. Once in a great while, however, such an exchange can result in a 'super-virus.' That virus out-competes all the others and the above immunological cycle will repeat.

Smithfield
In 1985, Smithfield Foods (now the largest pork producer in the country) received what was, at the time, the most expensive fine in history - $12.6 million - for violating the US Clean Water Act at its pig facilities near the Pagan River in Smithfield, Virginia, a tributary that flows into the Chesapeake Bay. US environmental law forced Smithfield to construct a sewage treatment plant at that facility after decades of using the river as a mega-toilet. But "free trade" offered Smithfield Farms an opportunity to simply move its harmful practices next door into Mexico and evade the tough US regulators.

In 1994 the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) came into effect. It reduced trade barriers across the U.S., Canada and Mexico. Products could now be marketed across the three countries without tariffs that favored domestic industries. The agreement also allowed companies to purchase and consolidate businesses in other member countries. That same year Smithfield Farms opened the "Carroll Ranches" or "Granjas Carroll" in the Mexican state of Veracruz.

Unlike what US law enforcers forced upon Smithfield Foods, the new Mexican facility - processing 800,000 pigs into bacon and other products per year - does not have a sewage treatment plant. The temperature inside hog houses is often over ninety degrees. The air, saturated with gases from feces and chemicals, can be lethal to the pigs. Enormous exhaust fans run twenty-four hours a day. If they break down for any length of time, pigs start dying. Manure (laced with antibiotic residue) is stored in lagoons that occasionally flood and release tons of raw manure into nearby streams and rivers, causing massive fish kills. Those living nearby such plants have numerous respiratory and other health problems.

A number of Mexican and U.S. news outlets are now pointing to Smithfield's plant as a likely source of the deadly outbreak. For months, local residents and workers in Mexico have complained of pollution, contamination, and illnesses from the Smithfield plant. The Vera Cruz-based paper La Marcha had a headline proclaiming "Granjas Carroll, causa de epidemia en La Gloria". La Gloria is the village where the outbreak seems to have started. The Mexico City daily La Jornada has also made the link. According to the newspaper, the Mexican health agency IMSS has acknowledged that the original carrier for the flu could be the "clouds of flies" that multiply in the Smithfield subsidiary's manure lagoons.

Concentration
As they seek to understand what upset the status quo in North American swine, researchers have turned to the environment. For North American pigs, the environment has recently changed dramatically in two ways: herd size and vaccination practices.

In 1965 there were 53,000,000 US hogs on more than 1 million farms; today, 65,000,000 hogs are concentrated in 65,000 facilities - twenty times as concentrated now as then. This has been a transition from old-fashioned pig pens to excremental hells, containing tens of thousands of animals with weakened immune systems suffocating in heat and manure while exchanging pathogens at blinding velocity with their fellow inmates.

In the past decade, big swine producers have gotten bigger, and many small producers have gone out of business. The percentage of farms with 5000 or more animals surged from 18% in 1993 to 53% in 2002. Having more pigs under one roof makes it more likely that a rogue virus can take hold. "With a group of 5000 animals, if a novel virus shows up, it will have more opportunity to replicate and potentially spread than in a group of 100 pigs on a small farm," says veterinary pathologist Kurt Rossow of the University of Minnesota.

Today, more than half of all sows are vaccinated against both H1N1 and H3N2 viruses. But the vaccine is not protecting against all new strains. "We're seeing clinical disease in vaccinated pigs," says Rossow. Flu is also showing up in piglets thought to be protected by maternal antibodies passed on from vaccinated sows. Widespread vaccination may actually be selecting for new viral types. If vaccination develops populations with uniform immunity to certain virus genotypes, say H1N1 and H3N2, then other viral mutants would be favored.

Last year a commission convened by the Pew Research Center issued a report on "industrial farm animal production" that underscored the acute danger that "the continual cycling of viruses … in large herds or flocks [will] increase opportunities for the generation of novel virus through mutation or recombinant events that could result in more efficient human to human transmission."

Scientists believe that the last two flu pandemics, or worldwide epidemics, in 1957 and 1968, occurred when avian flu and human flu viruses swapped genes in pigs, creating a new, hybrid virus that then spread to humans. In each case, the new virus appeared first in Southeast Asia, then around the globe. The 1918 "Spanish flu," which claimed upward of 40 million lives, may also have arisen first in pigs. Given that domesticated seasonal type-A influenzas kill as many one million people a year, even a modest increment of virulence, especially if combined with high incidence, could produce carnage equivalent to a major war.

It is not fair to blame this flu on pigs. They have nothing to do with how it emerges. They didn't organize themselves into cities of thousands of immuno-compromised individuals. They didn't intentionally breed out the genetic variation that could have helped reduce viral transmission rates. They didn't opt to live in livestock ghettos alongside thousands of industriallt-raised poultry. They don't ship themselves thousands of miles by truck, train or air. No, this sad situation is a product of human energy, design, and greed. Like most such products, it is now taking its toll on the innocent and the public.

Take Action
Contact President Obama, Secretary of Agriculture Vilsack and your Congressional representatives. Urge them to: Regulate CAFOs (hog, beef, and chicken factory farms) across the United States by strict environmental and worker safety standards, to work through international agencies to end this dangerous practice worldwide, and to end the non-therapeutic feeding of antibiotics to farm animals, a practice without which CAFOs could not exist.

This page was last modified on May 11, 2009 at 9:44:09 AM.     Translate this page: