Sick Factory Farming and The Flu Pandemic

So, we have a new timeline.

1992 - The Mexican government seizes land belonging to local Veracruz farmers. This sparks a protest movement called Los 400 Pueblos who are well known for marching through Mexico city wearing only photographs of politicians

1994 - 'Granjas Carroll' buy some of this land to build a 'Confined Animal Feeding Operation', a massive intensive factory farm with a million pigs in La Gloria, an area with 3000 residents. They are part owned by Smithfield Foods, the worlds largest corporate pork producer with a $12billion annual turnover.

2009, February - a cloud of flies from the Granjas carroll manure lagoons infests Perote, and a powerful respiratory illness struck local residents. Local health officials first ask for help.

2009, March - Edgar Hernadez, a four year old local boy becomes the first traced victim of the new swine fever, although he fully recovers and it is initially misdiagnosed as ordinary influenza.

2009, April - After two local children die, health officials spray chemicals and pesticides throughout the town. 60% of the towns residents fall ill.

A professional timeline, which is careful not to blame the pig farm for this outbreak is here:
 http://biosurveillance.typepad.com/biosurveillance/2009/04/swine-flu-in-mexico-timeline-of-events.html


Smithfield Foods operate in the UK since 2004 when they bought and merged the Norwich Food Company and Ridpath PEK, later also buying the Sara Lee range. Along with their Aoste and Morliny ranges they also supply meat for the WeightWatchers products. Their slogan is 'Good Food. Responsibly' - and if anyone does want to hold them responsible then their UK HQ is Smithfield Foods Ltd, St James’ Mill, Whitefriars, Norwich NR3 1TN.

Smithfield's pigs live by the hundreds or thousands in warehouse-like barns, in rows of wall-to-wall pens. Sows are artificially inseminated and fed and delivered of their piglets in cages so small they cannot turn around. Forty fully grown 250-pound male hogs often occupy a pen the size of a tiny apartment. They trample each other to death. There is no sunlight, straw, fresh air or earth. The floors are slatted to allow excrement to fall into a catchment pit under the pens, but many things besides excrement can wind up in the pits: afterbirths, piglets accidentally crushed by their mothers, old batteries, broken bottles of insecticide, antibiotic syringes, stillborn pigs -- anything small enough to fit through the foot-wide pipes that drain the pits. The pipes remain closed until enough sewage accumulates in the pits to create good expulsion pressure; then the pipes are opened and everything bursts out into a large holding pond.

The temperature inside hog houses is often hotter than ninety degrees. The air, saturated almost to the point of precipitation with gases from shit and chemicals, can be lethal to the pigs. Enormous exhaust fans run twenty-four hours a day. The ventilation systems function like the ventilators of terminal patients: If they break down for any length of time, pigs start dying.

From Smithfield's point of view, the problem with this lifestyle is immunological. Taken together, the immobility, poisonous air and terror of confinement badly damage the pigs' immune systems. They become susceptible to infection, and in such dense quarters microbes or parasites or fungi, once established in one pig, will rush spritelike through the whole population. Accordingly, factory pigs are infused with a huge range of antibiotics and vaccines, and are doused with insecticides. Without these compounds -- oxytetracycline, draxxin, ceftiofur, tiamulin -- diseases would likely kill them. Thus factory-farm pigs remain in a state of dying until they're slaughtered. When a pig nearly ready to be slaughtered grows ill, workers sometimes shoot it up with as many drugs as necessary to get it to the slaughterhouse under its own power. As long as the pig remains ambulatory, it can be legally killed and sold as meat.

The drugs Smithfield administers to its pigs, of course, exit its hog houses in pig shit. Industrial pig waste also contains a host of other toxic substances: ammonia, methane, hydrogen sulfide, carbon monoxide, cyanide, phosphorous, nitrates and heavy metals. In addition, the waste nurses more than 100 microbial pathogens that can cause illness in humans, including salmonella, cryptosporidium, streptocolli and girardia. Each gram of hog shit can contain as much as 100 million fecal coliform bacteria.

Smithfield's holding ponds -- the company calls them lagoons -- cover as much as 120,000 square feet. The area around a single slaughterhouse can contain hundreds of lagoons, some of which run thirty feet deep. The liquid in them is not brown. The interactions between the bacteria and blood and afterbirths and stillborn piglets and urine and excrement and chemicals and drugs turn the lagoons pink.

The lagoons themselves are so viscous and venomous that if someone falls in it is foolish to try to save him. A few years ago, a truck driver in Oklahoma was transferring pig shit to a lagoon when he and his truck went over the side. It took almost three weeks to recover his body. In 1992, when a worker making repairs to a lagoon in Minnesota began to choke to death on the fumes, another worker dived in after him, and they died the same death. In another instance, a worker who was repairing a lagoon in Michigan was overcome by the fumes and fell in. His fifteen-year-old nephew dived in to save him but was overcome, the worker's cousin went in to save the teenager but was overcome, the worker's older brother dived in to save them but was overcome, and then the worker's father dived in. They all died in pig shit.

The chairman of Smithfield Foods, Joseph Luter III, is a funny, jowly, canny, barbarous guy who lives in a multimillion-dollar condo on Park Avenue in Manhattan and conveys himself about the planet in a corporate jet and a private yacht. At sixty-seven, he is unrepentant in the face of criticism. He describes himself as a "tough man in a tough business" and his factories as wholly legitimate products of the American free market. He can be sardonic; he likes to mock his critics and rivals.

"The animal-rights people," he once said, "want to impose a vegetarian's society on the U.S. Most vegetarians I know are neurotic." When the Environmental Protection Agency cited Smithfield for thousands of violations of the Clean Water Act, Luter responded by comparing what he claimed were the number of violations the company could theoretically have been charged with (2.5 million, by his calculation) to the number of documented violations up to that point (seventy-four). "A very, very small percent," he said.

The current swine flu outbreak should be taken as a dire warning to mankind!

Seriously, nothing less than that. Some folk can decry me all they desire, but mankind sows terrible uncompassion for livestock animals, then keeps expecting to not reap a disaster or two from such bad sowing. I've not been a farm worker, but have been on many farms. Once, when mad cows' disease was rampant, I stood watching a flock of sheep in a barn, they shortly to go for slaughter. Even to my non-farming knowledge, quite a few of them looked as if they had scrapies, weak on their legs, like drunken sailors, and continuously nodding their necks to and fro.

Even the farmer was somewhat aghast at their actions. Mates, I tell you the truth, the animals will unwittingly get their revenge on at least many of those who eat them. Just think about it? I don't ever see the day when vegetables will be killing anyone off. Except those maybe that will be saturated with chemicals, eh? But not to fret, eh, because we all know those old scientists will swiftly develope a cure for whatever would-be killer diseases come along. And remember, our old airlines can transport diseases from afar quite rapidly! Airborne diseases, eh?