Swine Flu From Factory Farm

Is it from that factory farm, though, the one in Mexico? We may never know precisely, but we do know at the least that its parent strain comes from a factory hog farm in the US:

... H3N2 — the letters denote specific gene variants that code for replication-enhancing enzymes — is the name of a hybrid first identified in North Carolina in 1998, the tail end of a decade which saw the state’s hog production rise from two million to 10 million, even as the number of farms dropped.

... At an environmental level, the conditions which shaped H3N2 and H1N2 evolution, and increased the variants’ chances of taking a human-contagious form, are well understood. High-density animal production facilities came to dominate the U.S. pork industry during the late 20th century, and have been adopted around the world. Inside them, pigs are packed so tightly that they cannot turn, and literally stand in their own waste.

Diseases travel rapidly through such immunologically stressed populations, and travel with the animals as they are shuttled throughout the United States between birth and slaughter. That provides ample opportunity for strains to mingle and recombine. An ever-escalating array of industry-developed vaccines confer short-term protection, but at the expense of provoking flu to evolve in unpredictable ways.

... It may well prove impossible to pinpoint exactly where [the new swine flu] first emerged or became infectious to people. But most of its genes are almost certainly part of a North American industrial virus lineage long expected to produce pandemic variants like this one. ...

Read the whole thing, the article goes on to describe the reason the flu has been mutating so fast in recent years, chief being the flu vaccines they give the animals to stop the spread of a sickness that's mainly a problem because of how they're raised.

Biological principles are more complicated than the ones that govern the manufacture of screwdrivers, cars and lampshades. They are, however, reasonably well understood.

Do predictably stupid things, you will get predictably bad results.

And I understand if people want to point out that hunger kills and hurts a lot more people than this outbreak has done. I won't argue that. It's just that the entire food system is broken, and part of that breakage is the mass, monocrop cultivation of grains and legumes solely for the sake of maintaining these animals in extremely unhealthy conditions. That's just stupid.

People need a larger variety of food, these animals need forage, and no animals are healthier when they're packed into tiny crates and forced to stand in their own waste.