from Sunday Herald, 03 May 2009
National and international agencies were warned four years ago that cramming millions of pigs into massive industrial farms could trigger a global pandemic of swine flu.
Expert scientists from the Centre for Emerging Infectious Diseases at the University of Iowa, at the heart of US pig-farming country, said in 2005 that intensive hog farms were a “tremendous potential reservoir” for flu viruses.
Viruses could easily spread to swine workers, mutate and end up as new strains “of pandemic potential”, they said. “The potential for a virulent, highly communicable, novel virus to move from swine to man seems to be great.”
In the last few weeks that seems to be exactly what has happened. Although the source of the swine flu that is sweeping the globe hasn’t been confirmed, most suspicions point to the huge pork farms near La Gloria, east of Mexico City, which produce nearly a million pigs a year.
A team led by Dr Gregory Gray at the University of Iowa College of Public Health has long been investigating the risks of viruses jumping from animals to people. In November 2005, they published a major study in the scientific journal, Clinical Infection Diseases.
It pointed out that an enormous shift had taken place in pig farming in the US over the last 60 years. In 1965 there were over a million farmers each with an average of 50 pigs, but now there are only 50,000 farmers with an average of 900 pigs each.
In Iowa there are nearly nine time more pigs than people, with 25 million hogs a year raised at 9,300 farms. Tens of thousands of pigs housed in confined spaces “may hasten viral mutation”, the study said.
“The potential for animal-to-animal transmission among pigs in a swine confinement operation will be much greater than on a traditional farm because of the pigs’ crowding resulting in prolonged and more frequent contact,” it argued.
“In addition, virus-laden secretions from pigs may be more concentrated, and reductions in ventilation and sunshine exposure may prolong viral viability. Thus, a confinement operation worker’s probability of acquiring influenza virus infection may be increased, compared with that of a traditional swine worker.”
The study warned that swine workers could “initiate epidemics” by mixing the viral strains which would then trigger a pandemic. “They may serve as a conduit for a novel virus to move from swine to man or from man to swine,” the study said.
“One might envision that, once a novel virus is introduced into a densely populated swine barn, the viral loads swine workers would experience could overwhelm any partial immunity they might possess. After work, they may readily communicate that virus to their family members and neighbours.”
Gray and his colleagues uncovered evidence that swine flu was widespread in farmers, meat processing workers and vets. They also pointed out that the infection now occurred all the year round in pig farms, instead of just seasonally as in the past.
“Should pandemic influenza virus strains enter the United States and these workers not be given special attention, we think it could be a really big problem for Iowa,” Gray said in 2005.
The scientists called for swine workers to be included in pandemic surveillance programmes, and given swine flu drugs and vaccines. It’s not clear, however, whether their advice was followed.
Their warnings have been echoed by other US scientists. Last year Amy VIncent from the US Department of Agriculture in Iowa said there was “potential for pandemic influenza emergence in North America”.
And in 2004 Richard Webby from St Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, said that US pigs were “an increasingly important reservoir of viruses with human pandemic potential”.
The evidence has prompted organic food groups to blame swine flu on industrial farming. “It looks likely that the emergence of swine flu is linked to large-scale intensive pig production,” said the director of Soil Association Scotland, Hugh Raven.
The area of Mexico where the swine pandemic is suspected of having started had “shocking industrial animal factories”, he alleged. “Worse and worse examples of industrial animal production will cause greater and greater risks of dangerous pathogens developing.”
This was the wrong way to produce our food because the risks were too high, Raven argued. “And it doesn't have to be that way. Family farms produced excellent healthy food for generations before animal factories were developed. Fortunately Scotland, unlike that part of Mexico, still has plenty of them.”
But Michael Barrett, professor of biochemical parasitology at the University of Glasgow, took a different line. Although factory farming pigs was “disgusting and greed-driven”, it wasn’t necessarily to blame, he argued.
Those that attack the global meat industry ignore “the regularity with which these pandemics have emerged through history, predating the practices of intensive farming”, he said.
Even before the scientific age, ancient scriptures have advised on what to eat and what not to eat
Posted by: Dropshippers | 24 July 2009 at 01:33 PM
Yes...now it has acquired epidemic proportions and what do we do?
Posted by: celebrities pictures | 06 July 2009 at 07:28 AM