Swine Flu Ancestor Born on US Factory FarmsWired Science.com: Scientists have traced the genetic lineage of the new H1N1 swine flu to a strain that emerged in 1998 in US factory farms, where it spread and mutated at an alarming rate. Experts warned then that a pocket of the virus would someday evolve to infect humans, perhaps setting off a global pandemic...
High-density animal production facilities came to dominate the US 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.
Modern factory farms a 'perfect storm' for powerful viruses
Johann Hari, The Independent: In most swine farms today, 6,000 pigs are crammed snout-to-snout in tiny cages where they can barely move, and are fed for life on artificial pulp, while living on top of cess-pools of their own stale faeces...
[HiN1] is a slight variant on a virus we have seen before... Its daddy was a virus that evolved in the artificial breeding ground of a vast factory farm in North Carolina... We know that the city where this swine flu first emerged -- Perote, Mexico -- contains a massive industrial pig farm, and houses 950,000 pigs...
We know that bird flu developed in the world's vast poultry farms. And we know that pumping animal feed full of antibiotics in factory farms has given us a new strain of MRSA. It's a simple, horrible process...
Of course, agribusiness is desperate to deny all this is happening... But once you factor in the cost of all these diseases and pandemics, cheap meat suddenly looks like an illusion. We always knew that factory farms were a scar on humanity's conscience -- but now we know they are a scar on our health.
