There’s a long tradition of naming flu pandemics after their presumptive geographical ground zero. The Hong Kong flu. Asian flu. Fujian flu. And the dreadful Spanish flu (which almost certainly didn’t start in Spain).
So why not the Mexico flu? Because – as Renee at Womanist Musings and nojojojo at Alas amply show – you can’t invoke Mexico in this country without dragging in a truckload of racist, anti-immigration baggage.
While I like nojojo’s suggestions of “Colonialism Cough” and “Greedy Gringo Fever,” I’m sort of attached to the historical naming patterns. So, staying in that grand geographical tradition, I vote for “Factory Farm Flu.” Srsly. Evidence is mounting that this virus mutated in a literal and figurative epidemiological pigsty: the Smithfield factory farm, which Amanda Marcotte describes as “absolutely swimming in pig shit and carcasses.” And Factory Farm Flu is nicely alliterative, too!
We do need a name change, because “swine flu” is misleading in more ways than one. For instance, Russia has banned pork imports from Ohio to try to keep the disease at bay. They’d do far better to ban imports of Ohio’s live humans instead of our dead pigs, which are completely incapable of infecting consumers in Russia or anywhere.
Of course, Factory Farm Flu might not help hog futures, either, but that’s all right by me. (Daisy Deadhead has a fine post on why this ought to be putting all of us off meat.) Swine flu wouldn’t be able to mutate so easily if it weren’t endemic in certain pig populations. The crowding of factory farms promotes viral transmission. The only effect of those buckets of antibiotics fed to hogs is to halt bacterial superinfections. Meanwhile, the flu virus merrily reproduces and mutates.
And then there are the echoes of the 1976 swine flu panic. At Salon, Patrick Di Justo has a nuanced account of the events in ’76, which I remember pretty well (I was 12 at the time). In short, a panel of world-famous virologists all agreed that President Ford had better fast-track a vaccine. By the time the vaccine was ready, public health authorities already realized that the epidemic wasn’t materializing. The government went ahead and vaccinated people anyway. Death and paralysis from Guillain-Barre were ascribed to the vaccine, though Di Justo questions that link. Even a single death due to the vaccine would have been one too many, because by then the government’s motivations were purely political.
While Di Justo’s airtight analysis sticks entirely to the events of 1976, an uncritical reader could easily infer wrong lessons for the present: Swine flu is inherently benign, and so we’re overreacting. Gawker is doing just that, sneering at the current concern – hey, all swine flu is the same, isn’t it?
No, actually it’s not. “Swine flu” just means that the viruses were hosted by pigs while they scrambled their sloppy RNA into new mutations. This particular H1N1 strain shows signs of human, bird, and swine origins. The pigs just served as big, pink, grunting petri dishes for all that RNA to mix, mingle, and mutate.
Finally, changing the name to Factory Farm Flu would force asshats like this Salon commenter to be a tad more imaginative:
This disease resulted from college students going to Mexico on spring break, who couldn’t come up with the cash for the local prostitutes. You don’t need to go to flying saucer theories to find any other way pig DNA could combine with human DNA.
Eeeew. At first I thought this referred to Mexican girls, but I guess not. Just one more reason to vote for “Factory Farm Flu.” And one less reason to hang out with the aging frat boys in Salon’s comment section. (Why do I ever go there?)
Rolling the pig dice – image by Flickr user Kaptain Kobold, used under a Creative Commons license.
Patron cat of Kittywampus (1985-2001)
Pass the Pigs!! I played that game all the time in the car on vacation : )
I remember a friend having a version of this. I also have some recollection of making the pigs do R-rated things together.
And I have yet to see a single word from the mainstream media on Smithfield Farms (beware, gross pictures of dead pigs and shit), the major suspect in incubating this nasty thing.
gggrrrrowf!
From what I’ve read, flu can spread among pigs even if they’re not concentrated to this extent. But there are lots of good reasons to ban factory farming, starting with the cruelty of them and ending with the multiple threats they pose to human health: antibiotic resistance, e. coli infected produce from their runoff, etc. Of course Smithfield Farms is already demonstrating that they can do whatever they want outside the U.S. borders anyway, so I don’t know how effective regulation can be.
I don’t eat pork anyway, but if I did, I would sure want to buy the meat directly from a local, small-scale farmer (like some of my meat-eating friends do).
I’m not a vegetarian, but I haven’t had pork in at least 20 years. I live in North Carolina, where there are more hogs than people. NC is the 10th most populous state, so that statistic is meaningful.
Here, Smithfield has had workers under its big, fat, corrupt thumb for seemingly forever. In rural parts of NC (where I grew up and still have family) the word “union” is like profanity (that isn’t unique to NC, as most everyone knows, but common throughout the South). Only after more than a decade-long struggle were workers at Smithfield’s Tar Heel, N.C., workers finally able to prevail at joining the UFCW last year. Clearly, Smithfield does whatever it wants within U.S. boundaries too.
In related news … Lundy Packing plant in Clinton has owned the town for forever. When I was in second grade, one of our field trips was to the packing plant. All of us were returned to the bus with a complimentary pound of bacon and a button with a cute pig on it. We were indoctrinated early. The whole town stinks. The company brings the symphony to town for free concerts, “giving back” to the community as often as they can.
Factory farming is disgusting and unconscionable. People who live near hog farms complain about the smell while their mouths are full of bacon. They obviously can’t see what their own contribution is.
The other day I was at our local farmers market and was chatted up by a woman whose employer grows pigs in a natural environment, with trees and shade. They don’t have to nurse their young through iron bars while lying on slabs of concrete. Their tails aren’t even docked. But I still couldn’t bring myself to take her up on her offer of a free sample of smoked sausage. I just don’t want to get used to the taste, which, I recall, was fabulous. Of course the price was double, which is totally sensible. I live in an urban area, so there are many people who are giving them business. In the Triangle (RTP) area, you have to sign up for CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) subscriptions more than a year in advance. Bad for our household because we can’t ever get in, but good for the producers who have found innovative solutions to making their businesses successful.
I feel bad, sg, as many of my comments are longer than your original post. But here’s a subject I really know about and can’t resist the opportunity to crow (or, rather, oink).
No, please don’t apologize! This is a really sharp inside look at how factory farming can shape and work a community. You should consider publishing it as a standalone post at your own blog.
I heard a report on NPR where a Johns Hopkinds public health professor, Ellen Silbergeld, was interviewed on the risk factory farming poses in creating new pathogens. She said that near farms like the Smithfield operation, flies have been found to carry flu virus on the legs, miles away from the actual farm. The waste that runs off from these farms – in largely unregulated fashion – contains all sorts of pathogens. I knew that e. coli and salmonella have spread to spinach and other vegetable crops in this way. However, she said that flu viruses have been known to subsist for months in the waste materials! This really shocked me, because my understanding was that the virus can live on a surface without a host for a couple of hours – not indefinitely. I don’t know why this would work differently in factory farm waste – perhaps there’s a steady supply of new pathogens being added to it? Maybe there’s something about the yuck that sustains them?
Anyway, Prof. Silbergeld confirmed that we really do need to worry about the human risks emanating from factory farms, as well as the animal cruelty, of course. And that factory farming is a plausible source for this new mutation.