Swine flu – What Airports and Factory Farms Have in Common

Swine flu -  while the evening news is talking about how to avoid the flu, aren’t we all equally curious about how it got here in the first place?

Leslie Hatfield over at The Green Fork made a great comparison – a person sick on a plane likened to a sick pig in a factory farm:

Here’s the connection: if a commercial flight is a prime breeding ground for airborne infectious disease, consider the digs of modern hogs. Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), also known as factory farms, bring together tens of thousands of animals in quarters that make a sold-out 747 look spacious. Keeping a cap on disease in such conditions has risen to a sort of macabre art form involving the use of antibiotics (including the “non-therapeutic” use, which means that they feed the animals antibiotics as a preventative measure) to ward off the infectious diseases you might expect to thrive in such a place. This practice has been linked to the spread of drug-resistant MRSA bacteria, but is not likely the cause of the influenza outbreak. Manure lagoons, the gigantic receptors for the millions of gallons of excrement expelled by the thousands of animals, may be the more likely culprit.

Read her whole post here.

And for more about the connection to factory farming and the flu -

Grist.org: Swine-flu outbreak could be linked to Smithfield factory farms and  Symptom: swine flu. Diagnosis: industrial

The Huffington Post: “Patient Zero” identified in Mexican Flu Outbreak? and Swine Flu Outbreak — Nature Biting Back at Industrial Animal Production?