Grist: Time for the mainstream media to face the factory farm-swine flu link

[marmar]

Denialism and H1N1

Time for the mainstream media to face the factory farm-swine flu link

Posted 9:05 PM on 10 Nov 2009
by Tom Philpott


“Since last spring and the onset of the 2009 pandemic H1N1 influenza outbreak in humans, USDA has consistently asked that the media stop calling this “novel” pandemic virus “swine flu.” By continuing to mislabel the 2009 pandemic H1N1 influenza virus that is affecting human populations around the world, the media is causing undue and undeserved harm to America’s agriculture industry, especially to pork producers.”
—From the USDA Website
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Novelist-turned-anti-meat-pamphleteer Jonathan Safran Foer made a stark claim about swine flu on The Ellen DeGeneres Show recenly:

This swine flu that’s now an epidemic, they’ve been able to trace it back to a farm in North Carolina… A hog farm. Nobody knows this. Nobody talks about it. We’ve been told this lie that it came from Mexico.

Well, the situation is even worse than Foer suggests. Authorities aren’t actually saying the novel strain of swine flu “came from Mexico.” That would be uncomfortable, because it first cropped up there a few miles from vast hog operations run by U.S. pork giant Smithfield.

But they are insisting that “pork is safe”—and doing little or nothing to monitor hog confinements for evidence of infection.

For years before the current outbreak, scientists openly worried that CAFOs (concentrated animal feedlot operations) provided excellent arenas for the generation and spread of dangerous new flu varieties. ...........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.grist.org/article/2009-11-10-mainstream-media-cafo-swine-flu-foer/

[stray cat]

1. Does this writer know anything at all about the make up of the virus?

Looking at the credentials I guess not. Maybe if he took a biology course?

[Junkdrawer]

2. Symbiosis. Factory Farms churn out new virus....The Vaccine Industry makes big profits...

It's all good.