Swine Flu & Factory Farms

Flu and Factory Farms

Sat May 2, 2009 8:28 pm (PDT)


On the web: http://accuracy.org/newsrelease.php?articleId=1980

Institute for Public Accuracy
915 National Press Building, Washington, D.C. 20045
(202) 347-0020 * http://www.accuracy.org * ipa@accuracy.org
___________________________________________________

PM Thursday, April 30, 2009

Swine Flu and Factory Farms

ROBERT WALLACE, walla353@umn.edu
Wallace is visiting professor in the department of geography at the
University of Minnesota and author of the forthcoming book "Farming
Human Pathogens: Ecological Resilience and Evolutionary Process." He
write a blog called "Farming Pathogens: Disease in a world of our own
making."

His most recent piece is "The NAFTA Flu," available at his web page:
http://farmingpathogens.wordpress.com .

He writes of the name "swine flu": "It detracts from an obvious
point: pigs have very little to do with how influenza emerges. They
didn't organize themselves into cities of thousands of
immuno-compromised pigs. They didn't artificially select out the genetic
variation that could have helped reduce the transmission rates at which
the most virulent influenza strains spread. They weren't organized into
livestock ghettos alongside thousands of industrial poultry. They don´t
ship themselves thousands of miles by truck, train or air. Pigs do not
naturally fly.

"The onus must be placed on the decisions we humans made to organize
them this way. And when we say 'we,' let's be clear, we're talking how
agribusinesses have organized pigs and poultry. ...

"The North American Free Trade Agreement, pushed by Bill Clinton in
1993 and approved by a bipartisan Congress, reduced trade barriers
across the U.S., Canada and Mexico. Products could now be marketed
across the three countries without levies that favored domestic
industries. The agreement also allowed companies to purchase and
consolidate businesses in other member countries. ...

"Where the housing bubble and banking collapse mark the aftermath of
financial deregulation, H1N1 is only one of several pathogens that now
track neoliberalism's effects on global health."

Background: For an interview with Wallace on Democracy Now, see:
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/4/29/the_nafta_flu

For additional background, click on title above to see from The Real News, "Agri-biz at root of swine flu?":
http://therealnews.com/t/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=3632&updaterx=2009-04-30+12%3A04%3A30

Also see "The Meatrix," an animated film about factory farming:
http://www.themeatrix.com, or on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEkc70ztOrc

For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167