Two articles in today's La Jornada point to one of the possible reasons for the current world public health alert: the way we raise livestock for food. Mike Davis, in "Los cerdos peligrosos usan traje," Dangerous Pigs Wear Suits, points out the problems created by the "transnational industrialization of livestock production." Raised in cramped pens, fed antibiotics and hormones to keep them alive long enough to go to market, pigs have become the perfect culture medium for new strains of drug-resistant virus. According to Davis, in 1965 the US raised 55 million pigs on a million farms. Today it raises 65 million swine in only 65,000 farms, more than half of which contain more than at least 5,000 animals each.
The current crisis was predicted years ago. Davis cites a 2003 Science article by Bernice Wuerthrich that states that "after years of stability, the North American swine flu virus has jumped towards a fast track evolution." In 1998 a North Carolina pig farm was decimated by an outbreak of a particularly virulent strain of the swine flu. For some scientists this event marked the genetic change towards ever more lethal viral strains.
The second La Jornada article of interest today was "Cuna de la influenza patógena," written by Alejandro Nadal. The article traces the viral outbreak in Mexico to a young boy who contracted the disease in the town of La Gloria, near Perote, Veracruz. The boy came down with the disease in March along with 400 others in that mountain village. By April 6 state government authorities had recognized a strange "respiratory disease" and cordoned off the area.
So why might the disease appear in a small village in Mexico's Sierra Madre Oriental? Well, it turns out that the Granjas Carroll, a subsidiary of the transnational Smithfield Foods, has a pig farm in the area. In last night's news conference, Health Secretary José Angel Córdova avoided answering a journalist's question about whether the Perote outbreak was the origin of the disease in Mexico.
A crisis such as the one we are living, is an opportunity for reflection about the way we live. One element that deserves thought is our diet. We tend to take the food on our table for granted without questioning its origin, or the form in which it was produced. An increasing number of authors have suggested that the way we raise our livestock is a danger to our health.
The above photo was taken from Marlerblog, http://www.marlerblog.com/tags/campylobacter/, written by Bill Marler who writes about health issues related to our farming techniques.
For further information, check out this article from El Universal http://www.eluniversal.com.mx/notas/594485.html
1 comment:
mr j
i thought that viruses are dead but they just keep defying the normal
mario
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