[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] A food system that kills

[Bill Totten]

Swine flu is meat industry's latest plague

GRAIN (April 28 2009)


Mexico is in the midst of a hellish repeat of Asia's bird flu
experience, though on a more deadly scale. Once again, the official
response from public authorities has come too late and bungled in
cover-ups. And once again, the global meat industry is at the centre of
the story, ramping up denials as the weight of evidence about its role
grows. Just five years after the start of the H5N1 bird flu crisis, and
after as many years of a global strategy against influenza pandemics
coordinated by the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the World
Organisation for Animal Health (OIE), the world is now reeling from a
swine flu disaster. The global strategy has failed and needs to be
replaced with a public health system that the public can trust.

What we know about the situation in Mexico is that, officially speaking,
more than 150 people have died from a new strain of swine flu that is,
in fact, a genetic cocktail of pig, bird and human influenza strains. It
has evolved to a form that is easily spread from human to human and is
capable of killing perfectly healthy people. We do not know where
exactly this genetic recombination and evolution took place, but the
obvious place to start looking is in the factory farms of Mexico and the
US. {1}

Experts have been warning for years that the rise of large-scale factory
farms in North America has created the perfect breeding grounds for the
emergence and spread of new highly-virulent strains of influenza.
"Because concentrated animal feeding operations tend to concentrate
large numbers of animals close together, they facilitate rapid
transmission and mixing of viruses", said scientists from the US
National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 2006. {2} Three years earlier,
Science Magazine warned that swine flu was on a new evolutionary "fast
track" due to the increasing size of factory farms and the widespread
use of vaccines in these operations. {3} It's the same story with bird
flu. The crowded and unsanitary conditions of the farms make it possible
for the virus to recombine and take on new forms very easily. Once this
happens, the centralised nature of the industry ensures that the disease
gets carried far and wide, whether by feces, feed, water or even the
boots of workers. {4} Yet, according to the US Centres for Disease
Control and Prevention (CDC), "no formal national surveillance system
exists to determine what viruses are prevalent in the US swine
population". {5} The same is true of Mexico.


Communities at the epicentre

Another thing we know about the swine flu outbreak in Mexico is that the
community of La Gloria in the state of Veracruz was trying to get
authorities to respond to a vicious outbreak of a strange respiratory
disease affecting them over the past months. The residents are adamant
that the disease is linked to pollution from the big pig farm that was
recently set up in the community by Granja Carroll, a subsidiary of the
US company Smithfield Foods, the world's largest pork producer.

After countless efforts by the community to get the authorities to help
- efforts which led to the arrest of several community leaders and death
threats against people speaking out against the Smithfield operations -
local health officials finally decided to investigate in late 2008.
Tests revealed that more than sixty per cent of the community of 3,000
people were infected by a respiratory disease, but officials did not
confirm what the disease was. Smithfield denied any connection with its
operations. It was only on 27 April 2009, days after the federal
government officially announced the swine flu epidemic, that information
came out in the press revealing that the first case of swine flu
diagnosed in the country was of a four-year old boy from the community
of La Gloria on April 2 2009.  Mexico's Minister of Health says a sample
taken from the boy was the only sample taken from the community that
Mexican officials retained and sent for laboratory testing, which later
confirmed that it was swine flu. {6} This despite the fact that a
private risk assessment firm in the US, Veratect, had notified regional
officials from the WHO about the outbreaks of the powerful respiratory
illness in La Gloria in early April 2009. {7}

On 4 April 2009, the Mexican daily La Jornada published an article on
the struggle of the community of La Gloria, with a photo in which a
young boy is holding a placard at a demonstration with a picture of a
pig crossed out and the words "Danger: Carrolls Farm" written on it in
Spanish. {8}

About influenza pandemics in general, we know that proximity of factory
pig farms and factory poultry farms increases the risks of viral
recombination and the emergence of new virulent flu strains. Pigs held
near to chicken farms in Indonesia, for instance, are known to have
high-levels of infection from H5N1, the deadly variant of bird flu. {9}
Scientists from the NIH warn "that increasing the numbers of swine
facilities adjacent to avian facilities could further promote the
evolution of the next pandemic". {10}

While it has not been widely reported, the region around the community
of La Gloria is also home to many large poultry farms. Recently, in
September 2008, there was an outbreak of bird flu among poultry in the
region. At the time, veterinary authorities assured the public that it
was only a local incidence of a low-pathogenic strain affecting backyard
birds. But we now know, thanks to a disclosure made by Marco Antonio
Nunez Lopez, the President of the Environmental Commission of the State
of Veracruz, that there was also an avian flu outbreak on a factory farm
about fifty kilometres from La Gloria owned by Mexico's largest poultry
company, Granjas Bachoco, that was not revealed because of fears of what
it might mean for Mexico's export markets. {11} It should be noted that
a common ingredient in industrial animal feed is "poultry litter", which
is a mixture of everything found on the floor of factory poultry farms:
fecal matter, feathers, bedding, et cetera.

Could there be a more ideal situation for the emergence of a pandemic
influenza virus than a poor rural area, full of factory farms owned by
transnational corporations who care nothing for the well-being of the
local people? The residents of La Gloria have tried for years to resist
the Smithfield farm. And they tried for months to get authorities to do
something about the strange illness hitting their people. They were
ignored. Their voices did not register a single blip on the radar of the
WHO's global emerging disease surveillance system. Nor did the bird flu
outbreaks in Veracruz trigger a response from the OIE's global disease
alert system. News only broke out haphazardly from private sources. {12}
This is what passes for global surveillance.


Corporate bias

It is not the first time and it will not be the last time that corporate
farms conceal disease outbreaks and put people's lives at risk. It is
the nature of their business. A couple of years ago in Romania,
Smithfield refused to let local authorities enter its pig farms after
residents complained of the stench coming from hundreds of dead corpses
of pigs left rotting for days at the farms. "Our doctors have not had
access to the American [company's] farms to effect routine inspections",
said Csaba Daroczi, assistant director at the Timisoara Hygiene and
Veterinary Authority. "Every time they tried, they were pushed away by
the guards. Smithfield proposed that we sign an agreement that would
oblige us to warn them three days before each inspection." {13}
Eventually, it emerged that Smithfield had been concealing a major
outbreak of classical swine fever on its Romanian farms. {14}

In Indonesia, where people are still dying from bird flu and where many
health experts believe the next pandemic virus will emerge, authorities
can still not enter large corporate farms without the permission of the
company. {15} In Mexico, authorities deflected calls to investigate La
Granja Carroll and accused the residents of La Gloria of spreading
infection because "they use home remedies instead of going to the health
centres to cure their flu". {16}

Factory farms are time-bombs for global disease epidemics. Yet, there
are still no programmes in place to deal with them, not even programmes
of independent disease surveillance. Nobody on high seems to care, and
it's probably no coincidence that these farms tend to be located amongst
the poorest communities, who suffer dearly to get the truth out. Worse
still, so much of our food supply now comes from this bloated system
that the main task of government food safety agencies now seems to be to
calm fears and keep people eating. Smithfield is already on the
financial brink and just last week was negotiating for China's largest
agribusiness company, COFCO, to take it over. {17}

In the meantime, the pharmaceutical industry is making a killing from
the crisis. The US government has already opened an emergency window in
its authorisation system to allow antivirals like Tamiflu and Relaxin to
be used more widely on flu sufferers than allowed. This is great news
for Roche, Gilead and Glaxo SmithKline, who hold monopolies on the
drugs. But even more importantly, a swathe of smaller vaccine producers
like Biocryst and Novavax are seeing their share prices shoot through
the roof. {18} Novavax is trying to convince both CDC and the Mexican
government that it can come up with a swine flu vaccine in as little as
twelve weeks if the testing rules remain relaxed.


Sea change needed

Clearly, the global system for dealing with health problems brought on
by the transnational food industry is completely upside down. Its
surveillance system is a bust, frontline public health and veterinarian
services are in a shambles and authority has been handed over to the
private sector, which has every interest in maintaining the status quo.
Meanwhile, people are told to keep indoors and to keep their fingers
crossed for Tamiflu or a new vaccine that they may or may not get access
to. This is not a tolerable situation; action for a sea change is
needed, now.

See photos at this website, where you can get more information:
http://enlace.vazquezchagoya.com/?p=812

In the specific case of the swine flu epidemic in Mexico, change can
start with an immediate, transparent and thorough independent
investigation of corporate pig and poultry farms in Veracruz, across the
country and throughout North America. The people of Mexico need to know
the source of the problem so that they can take adequate measures to cut
the epidemic off at its roots and to ensure that it does not reoccur.

At the international level, the expansion of factory farms has to stop
and be put into reverse. They are the hotbeds for pandemics and will
continue to be so as long as they exist. It is probably pointless to
call for a complete shift in the WHO-led global strategy, since the
experience with bird flu demonstrates that neither the WHO, nor the OIE,
nor most governments are going to take a hard line on corporate farming.
Once again, it is people who are going to have to take the lead and
protect themselves. Across the world, there are thousands of communities
fighting against factory farms. These communities are on the front lines
of pandemic prevention. What we now need is to turn these local fights
against factory farms into a global movement to abolish them.

But the swine flu disaster in Mexico is also about a larger public
health problem. The threats to consumer safety that are an inherent part
of the industrial food system are compounded by a global trend to
completely privatise health care, which has destroyed the capacities of
public systems to properly respond to crises, and by policies to
encourage migration to mega-cities where sanitation and public health
policies are woefully inadequate. (The outbreak of swine flu hit Mexico
City, a metropolis of more than twenty million people, just as the
government cut off water supplies for much of the city's population,
particularly the poorest sections.) The fact that surveillance of
disease outbreaks has to come from private consultancy firms, that
governments and UN agencies can sit quiet on that information and that
we have to depend on a handful of drug companies to produce half-tested
but fully-patented relief for our suffering should tell us that things
have gone too far. We need not only food but public health systems that
truly have some public agenda and public accountability to them.


Going further

Doreen Carvajal and Stephen Castle, A U.S. Hog Giant Transforms Eastern
Europe, New York Times, 5 May 2009,
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/06/business/global/06smithfield.html

Mike Mather, Newschannel 3 Investigates the Source of the Swine Flu, May
2009,
http://www.wtkr.com/news/wtkr-mather-mexico-smithfield-ceo,0,6628702.story
(Includes an interview with the CEO of Smithfield)

Luis Hernandez Navarro, Smithfield: un negocio muy marrano, La Jornada,
5 de mayo de 2009,
http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2009/05/05/?section=politica&article=031a1pol

Enrique Mendez y Andres Morales, Por 14 anos La Gloria ha vivido con
miedo por la contaminacion de Granjas Carroll, 2 mayo 2009,
http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2009/05/02/?section=politica&article=009n1pol

BBC, Egypt presses ahead with pig cull, 2 May 2009,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8030611.stm

Debora MacKenzie, Pork industry is blurring the science of swine flu, 30
April 2009,
http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2009/04/why-the-pork-industry-hates-th.html

Laura Carlsen, Mexico's Swine Flu and the Globalization of Disease,
Americas MexicoBlog, 29 April 2009,
http://americasmexico.blogspot.com/2009/04/mexicos-swine-flu-and-globalization-of.html

Ivan Restrepo, Granjas Carroll, protegida de las autoridades, La
Jornada, 13 de Abril de 2009
http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2009/04/13/?section=politica&article=020a2pol

Silvia Ribeiro, "Epidemia de lucro", La Jornada, 28 April 2009:
http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2009/04/28/?section=opinion&article=020a1pol

Tom Philpott, Symptom: swine flu. Diagnosis: industrial agriculture?
GRIST, 28 April 2009,
http://www.grist.org/article/2009-04-28-more-smithfield-swine/

Mike Davis, The swine flu crisis lays bare the meat industry's monstrous
power, The Guardian, 27 April 2009:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/apr/27/swine-flu-mexico-health

R G Wallace, "The Agro-Industrial Roots of Swine Flu H1N1", 26 April 2009
http://farmingpathogens.wordpress.com/2009/04/26/the-agro-industrial-roots-of-swine-flu-h1n1/

Edward Hammond, Indonesia fights to change WHO rules on flu vaccines,
Seedling, April 2009: http://www.grain.org/seedling/?id=593

Ivan Restrepo, Granjas Carroll, sin control ambiental, La Jornada, 24 de
Abril de 2006
http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2006/04/24/?section=opinion&article=026a2pol

See the GRAIN resources page on bird flu for the following articles
(http://www.grain.org/birdflu/):

GRAIN, "Bird flu in eastern India: another senseless slaughter", Against
the grain, February 2008, http://www.grain.org/articles/?id=35

GRAIN, "Germ warfare - Livestock disease, public health and the
military?industrial complex", Seedling, January 2008,
http://www.grain.org/seedling/?id=533

GRAIN, "Viral times - The politics of emerging global animal diseases",
Seedling, January 2008, http://www.grain.org/seedling/?id=532

GRAIN, "Bird flu: a bonanza for 'Big Chicken'", Against the grain, March
2007, http://www.grain.org/articles/?id=22 (also available in Bahasa
Indonesia)

GRAIN, "The top-down global response to bird flu", Against the grain,
April 2006, http://www.grain.org/articles/?id=12

GRAIN, "Fowl play: The poultry industry's central role in the bird flu
crisis", GRAIN Briefing, February 2006,
http://www.grain.org/briefings/?id=194


References

1 The pig industry in Mexico, like its counterpart in the US, does not
want the disease to be called "swine flu" on the grounds that it is
being transmitted not from pigs but directly between people. (Their main
concern, of course, is a pork market that is fast collapsing from the
stigma.) And some Mexican officials, like the Governor of Veracruz, are
telling the public that the virus came from China though there is no
evidence to support this claim.

2 Mary J Gilchrist, Christina Greko, David B Wallinga, George W Beran,
David G Riley and Peter S Thorne, "The Potential Role of CAFOs in
Infectious Disease Epidemics and Antibiotic Resistance", Journal of
Environmental Health Perspectives, 14 November 2006.

3 Bernice Wuethrich, "Chasing the Fickle Swine Flu", Science, Vol. 299, 2003

4 Pro-poor Livestock Policy Initiative, "Industrial Livestock Production
and Global Health Risks", FAO, 2007: http://www.fao.org/ag/againfo/
programmes/en/pplpi/docarc/pb_hpaiindustrialrisks.html

5 CDC, April 21, 2009 / 58 (Dispatch);1-3:
http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm58d0421a1.htm

6 Andres T Morales, "Cerco sanitario en Perote, tras muerte en marzo de
bebe por gripe porcina", La Jornada, 28 April 2009:
http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2009/04/28/?section=politica&article=012n2pol;
Tracy Wilkinson and Cecilia Sanchez, "Mexico tries to focus on source of
infection", Los Angeles Times, April 28, 2009.

7 Dudley Althaus, "World's queries have no answers", Houston Chronicle,
27 April 2009.

8 Andres Timoteo, "Alerta epidemiologica en Perote por brote de males
respiratorios", La Jornada, 4 April 2009.

9 David Cyranoski, "Bird flu spreads among Java's pigs", Nature 435, 26
May 2005.

10 Mary J Gilchrist, Christina Greko, David B Wallinga, George W Beran,
David G Riley and Peter S Thorne, "The Potential Role of CAFOs in
Infectious Disease Epidemics and Antibiotic Resistance", Journal of
Environmental Health Perspectives, 14 November 2006.

11 Piden cerco sanitario ante epidemia, SPI/ElGolfo.Info, 24 April 2009:
http://www.elgolfo.info/web/lo-mas-nuevo/37017-piden-cerco-sanitario-ante-epidemia-.html

12 Tom Philpott first broadcast the possible connection between the
swine flu outbreak and the Smithfield operation in Veracruz from his
US-based blog on 25 April 2009:
http://www.grist.org/article/2009-04-25-swine-flu-smithfield/

13 Mirel Bran: "Swine Plague: Romania Criticizes American Group's
Attitude", Le Monde, 15 August
2007, translated by Leslie Thatcher (Truthout).

14 GRAIN, "Viral times - The politics of emerging global animal
diseases", Seedling, January 2008

15 See "Box 2. Bird flu in Indonesia and Vietnam" (by GRAIN) in Edward
Hammond, "Indonesia fights to change WHO rules on flu vaccines",
Seedling, April 2009: http://www.grain.org/seedling/?id=593

16 "Afectados por extrana enfermedad, 60% de pobladores de La Gloria",
La Jornada 27 April 2009:
http://www.lajornadasanluis.com.mx/2009/04/27/pol15.php

17 "Is Smithfield on the market?", Farming UK, 26 April 2009.

18 "Smaller drug firms gaining from swine flu", Reuters, 27 April 2009:
http://www.reuters.com/article/pressReleasesMolt/idUSTRE53Q5P620090427

_____

GRAIN is an international non-governmental organisation which promotes
the sustainable management and use of agricultural biodiversity based on
people's control over genetic resources and local knowledge.

http://www.grain.org/articles/?id=48


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