Swine flu – DON’T eat Smithfield Foods pork

Apparently a Smithfield CAFO-type farm in Vera Cruz, Mexico is a likely source (hat tip Grist) for the swine flu outbreak:

Residents [of La Gloria, Perote Municipality, Veracruz State, Mexico] believed the outbreak had been caused by contamination from pig breeding farms located in the area. They believed that the farms, operated by Granjas Carroll, polluted the atmosphere and local water bodies, which in turn led to the disease outbreak. According to residents, the company denied responsibility for the outbreak and attributed the cases to ‘flu.’ However, a municipal health official stated that preliminary investigations indicated that the disease vector was a type of fly that reproduces in pig waste and that the outbreak was linked to the pig farms. It was unclear whether health officials had identified a suspected pathogen responsible for this outbreak.

Oh, this particular farm? According to Smithfield’s website, the Granjas plant “produced” (its words not mine!) 950,000 hogs last year. Holy hog shit, Batman.

Oh, and by the way, the first cases were nearly a month ago and no MSM coverage yet of the Smithfield angle in the U.S.

For your further curiosity, per Los Alamos National Laboratory, 50 days is the vector time for a full-blown outbreak if this isn’t controlled.

Let’s hope President Barack Obama’s public health emergency actually does something, and that it, in the long run, addresses CAFO livestock “production.”

Meanwhile, swine flu is another example of our need for parliamentary government.

The New York Times story explains it succinctly:

The outbreak in the United States comes before President Obama has his full health team in place. His nominee for health secretary, Kathleen Sebelius, has not yet been confirmed by the Senate, nor has the woman he selected to Food and Drug Administration, Margaret Hamburg, a former New York City health commissioner. Mr. Obama has not yet named anyone to run the Centers for Disease Control or the National Institutes of Health.

Why do people who should know better continue to defend the horribly antiquated Constitution of the United States?

And, given our two-party duopoly, while people may be quarantined, CAFO hog farms most certainly will not.