Novelist-turned-anti-meat-pamphleteer Jonathan Safran Foer made a stark claim about swine flu on The Ellen DeGeneres Show recently:
Well, the situation is even worse than Foer suggests. Authorities aren't actually saying the novel strain of swine flu "came from Mexico." That would be uncomfortable, because it first cropped up there a few miles from vast hog operations run by U.S. pork giant Smithfield.
But they are insisting that "pork is safe"-and doing little or nothing to monitor hog confinements for evidence of infection.
For years before the current outbreak, scientists openly worried that CAFOs (concentrated animal feedlot operations) provided excellent arenas for the generation and spread of dangerous new flu varieties.
Yet another bit of evidence on this score crossed my desk this week: a "News Focus" piece that ran in Science back in 2003 called "Chasing the Fickle Swine Flu." (PDF) It's jumping-off point is the very incident Foer pointed to on Ellen-the outbreak of a novel strain of flu, genetically related to the current strain, on a North Carolina farm in 1998. The opening is worth quoting at length:
