the swine flu
Due to the overwhelming news coverage and social chatter, I could not think of doing my blog entry on something other than the swine flu, or should I say H1N1 virus? Either way, everyone is talking about it. What's being talked about? How it's going to turn into a pandemic. How everyone is wearing those masks. Rumors are circulating left and right: Don't go on planes, run away from any mexicans you may see, kill all the pigs in Egypt, etc. But no one is really talking about where this flu came from, or how it could have been prevented.
Michael Greger wrote an article for the Humane Society (you can find it at http://www.hsus.org/farm/news/ournews/swine_flu_virus_origin_1998_042909.html) about how strains of this virus have been around for years. Keeping pigs in confined spaces and factory farms is not helping any. Pigs spread the illness just like humans, so having so many of them in a given area is just asking for trouble. In the article, I read “The fact that one of the first confirmed human cases of swine flu appeared in close proximity to the largest pig factory in Mexico, which slaughters nearly a million pigs a year (out of a country-wide total of 15 million), may not have been a coincidence.” I certainly did not know that until I saw that article. I only saw the article because a fellow animal activist emailed it to me. It’s not headlining CNN or yahoo.com.
No one is learning anything from this. It is just damage control. How are we going to prevent something like this from happening again if we don't take preventable measures?