Washing Our Hands

President Obama told the nation, twice, during tonight's press conference, that the best way for people to protect themselves from this flu epidemic is to cover coughs, stay home if we get sick, and wash our hands frequently.

Clearly, some sensible person at Health & Human Services got down on their knees and said something like, 'Look, I know it'll feel goofy, some people might make fun of you, but for the love of butterflies and little kittens, it'll probably save lives, so please do it anyway.'

And it seems pedestrian, boring even, but people didn't always know that it was a good idea. In fact, it wasn't understood as an important hygenic measure even in hospitals until the research of Ignaz Semmelweis in 1846 revealed its value in preventing childbed fever mortality in his maternity wards.

It's great when our immune systems can fight off diseases. But the best thing to do is prevent pathogen exposure in the first place. That's just good sense.

And while crazy people are still preoccupied with blaming immigrants and closing the border (and they aren't worried about the Canadians,) they forget that even if we could keep all Mexicans out of the United States (why we'd want to do that, I can't understand at all,) that ending all transit between our two neighboring countries would have to mean an end to American trips to Mexico?

Tijuana and Acapulco are, in their way, the Orlando and Miami of the Western US. It's where people go for a sun-drenched, not-too-distant vacation by the sea. It's where college kids go for Spring Break. Not to mention, there are a lot of bona fide US citizens who have relatives in Mexico, and an actually sealed border would mean keeping families from visiting each other.

And it wouldn't keep the flu out anyway. It's already in. Air travel technology has been around for a long, long time now. It was common before I was born.

What seems to be responsible for this outbreak is a serious failure of hygiene in a farming practice that was pioneered and instigated right here in the US. Even if the flu didn't come from the pigs themselves.

Can we all agree that enormous ponds of untreated pig shit constitute a public health threat? I hope so.

When Smithfield says that you can't get flu from eating pork, and that they don't know of any sick pigs or plant workers, even if they aren't lying, it's beside the point. They moved to Mexico specifically to get away with things they couldn't get away with in the US, to do to Mexican communities things they couldn't do to communities in the United States.

They violated health measures so common sense that they're codified into law in a country where pork producers have so much pull that even the AP thinks they got Obama to call the flu H1N1 instead of swine flu at the press conference:

... The news conference lasted an hour and covered topics ranging from the outbreak of swine flu — which Obama referred to as the H1N1 virus, evidently in deference to U.S. pork producers — to abortion and the recent flare-up in violence in Iraq. ...

I understand if journalists want to hold off accusing Smithfield of starting the flu, as says Curtis Brainard at CJR.

But it seems to me that they're missing all the other things that they rightfully need to be accusing them of. Brainard notes that tough questions need to be asked, but it seems that the media hasn't gotten around to asking them often enough. They just wash their hands.