Surprise, surprise

I’ve been reading so much on swine flu and factory farms, also known as CAFOs. There’s been a lot of controversy on whether they could indeed be blamed for creating this pandemic, and no proof of the particular strain found at the Veracruz pig farm just yet. This was one of the best articles I read on all that.

For starters, if you haven’t read this Rolling Stone article on the Smithfield Foods hog operation, you should. I did and it made me so angry. Apparently in the late 90s, pig farms grew to become humongous operations,  with tons of waste poorly managed.

So it’s no surprise to learn that the strain was linked back a U.S. factory farm in 1998 after all. Wired ran a great article on how the virus evolved:

“Inside them (factory farms), 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.”

So now what? Will people really think twice about where their meat is coming from in a year or two? Can we get CAFOs to one day pay fines for their public health and environmental damage? Do we stand a chance in putting an end to all this factory farming within my lifetime? We all want safe food, we want clean air, and water. CAFOs use up so many resources, they’ll only cause more disasters.

Tom Laskawy of Grist sums it up well here:

“We know more than enough to assert that it’s time for the public to learn what those of us in the sustainable world have understood for a long time—CAFOs are public health hazards of the highest order. And it’s also time that the public started to openly question why CAFOs and their owners are able to so brazenly flout environmental law—even laws written specifically to regulate their operations.”

In the meantime, I just hope there are no more pig massacres in countries where no one’s even infected.