Reply #13: Really?

[Yo_Mama]

The OP article claims that intensive factory farming causes flu pandemics.

How do you account for the 1918 flu epidemic, which was H1N1, and like this one, a virus which with multiple inclusions from avian and swine virus strains?

In recent times, there have been about 3 flu pandemics a century. Flu is suspected to have caused epidemics in earlier times, but cannot of course be confirmed:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1894950,00.html

This seems to be more of a natural cycle, and it seems to have predated modern farming techniques. The frequency of pandemics hasn't increased so far as we know. And since pigs easily get both avian and human flu, they do serve as a mixing vessel for viruses. But actually, modern intensive farming probably offers less mixing of fowl and pigs than the more traditional small homesteads that usually kept fowl and pigs.

Yeah, sure, on the face of it the theory advanced in the article makes sense, but where's the evidence? There were 3 flu pandemics in the 1700s, 3 in the 1800s, and 3 in the 1900s. In the 1990s it was proven that avian flu could pass from wild birds to domestic fowl and directly to humans. In one of the European outbreaks they traced over one thousand people who tested positive for antibodies for a straight avian virus.

There's another theory which is that this mixing occurs all the time, but pandemics only break out when the population has lost enough immunity to make it possible. That would account more easily for the level incidence of pandemics observed over centuries. As it is, the authorities are guessing that senior citizens now will have far more immunity to this virus than younger people.