How Industrial Animal Farming is Contributing to the Risk of a Swine Flu Epidemic

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Nicolette Hahn Niman-writer, lawyer, and rancher-addresses the connection between industrial animal farming and the swine flu epidemic.

"Last Thursday the World Health Organization declared the first flu pandemic in 41 years, after swine flu (H1N1) was found in 74 countries, infecting nearly 29,000 people so far. Even with the use of modern antiviral drugs where they are available, such a pandemic could kill over 100 million people. The WHO statement said nothing about this epidemic's underlying causes. They are undeniably complex. But what is clear is that the danger of such pandemics has been exacerbated by the industrialization of animal farming."

"...this pandemic reminds us that the current method of raising farm animals is fraught with risks to human health. In 1998, a virus that combined human, swine, and bird flus was discovered in pigs at industrial operations in North Carolina. It rapidly morphed as it moved from pig to pig and from herd to herd. Within months, the hybrid virus was showing up in hog operations throughout the United States. By early 1999, blood samples of pigs from 23 states showed that 20.5 percent had been exposed, according to Dr. Michael Greger, author of the book Bird Flu. "It is from this pool of viruses," Greger writes, "that the current swine flu threat derives three-quarters of its genetic material." Dr. Robert Webster, a leading flu expert and a director of the WHO Collaborating Center for Studies on the Ecology of Influenza in Animals and Birds, says that this "triple reassortment virus" is the likely precursor to the swine flu that is now sweeping the globe."

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