[Marxism] "Swine flu, pigs and profits" from Workers World

[Joaquin Bustelo]

Workers World  opines:

"While it's too soon to predict how widespread and deadly this new variation
of influenza virus will be, information about the likely origin of the
outbreak is starting to surface. A huge factory-farm pig operation owned by
U.S. corporate giant Smithfield and operated by its Mexican subsidiary,
Granjas Carroll de Mexico, may have spawned this new threat to public
health.

"Local residents from the towns of La Gloria and Perote in the Mexican state
of Veracruz have been fighting the pork-breeding giant for years."

Oy vey. The case for the virus having originated on these farms is close to
nonexistent. There have been *no* H1N1 cases confirmed among workers or pigs
at these farms. That ONE 5-year-old boy in the same town would test positive
for the virus, among 400 flu cases in a recent outbreak, with all others
tested (more than 50, if I remember right) coming up negative for this
specific virus, does not make the case. Quite the contrary. It suggests the
results of the tests on the boy are anomalous and suspicious. 

Could the sample have been contaminated? Mixed up or switched with some
other sample? Or might little Edgar have been exposed to someone from
outside the town who was carrying the virus? Or perhaps to a virus similar
to the one in this outbreak, and indeed genuinely from pigs, but unable to
readily infect others from a human host?

Whatever you want to speculate, one thing can be asserted with an extremely
high degree of scientific confidence: IF there is a "patient zero" of this
epidemic, as that term has been popularized from a book and movie about the
AIDS pandemic, it is NOT the pre-schooler in La Gloria. WHY? Because to be
"patient zero," you have to give it to someone else, and preferably lots of
someone elses. With reporters crawling ALL OVER La Gloria, no one has been
able to find patients one, two, three, four or five. And those in and around
the little boy's house have now all been tested. And all are negative.

Edgar may have been a very early patient in this epidemic, perhaps even the
EARLIEST patient, but ALL available evidence contradicts the idea that he
was "patient zero" in the sense of the first or one of the earliest
spreaders of the virus.

Joaquin