Firewall or Firestorm?

Firewall or Firestorm?

Postby Oscar » Mon Jun 08, 2009 1:31 pm

Firewall or Firestorm?

June 8, 2009

Dear Editor,

You have to admire the chutzpah of the Manitoba Pork Council (MPC) for its relentless public relations campaign aimed at convincing Manitobans that swine flu is somehow not related to Intensive Livestock Operations (ILOs).

The latest contributor to this project is MPC Region 9 Delegate Marg Rempel. In a recent letter to the Cooperator (“Secure hog barns provide flu firewall,” May 28), Ms. Rempel claims that, from a public health perspective, ILOs are superior to traditional forms of hog production. This is because “quarantine and biosecuirty measures are much easier to put in place and more effective than a production model where there are hundreds of small backyard herds.”

Ms. Rempel forgets that scientists have long warned that hog ILOs provide an ideal setting for accelerated swine flu virus mutation and interspecies transmission. Unlike small backyard herds, ILOs function like viral firestorm crucibles that require, common sense suggests, bio-security ‘firewalls’ similar to those found at level 4 labs.

The fact is that last month independent scientists studying the current swine flu virus at the Center for Computational Biology at Columbia University in New York reported compelling evidence that H1N1 is a variant of a known virus that evolved in a North Carolina swine ILO.

While their results have received little attention in Canada, they do reinforce the hog factory-swine flu virus linkage emphasized in the Mexican press. In April, Mexico City’s La Journada identified the Smithfield Foods’ massive Carroll Ranches ILO complex, producing 950,000 hogs annually, as the source of the flu outbreak in Perote, where the virus first emerged.

According to La Journada, one transmission vector identified by local Mexican health authorities is a type of fly that reproduces in the untreated pig waste stored in open lagoons at the Carroll complex. The implications of this for Ms. Rempel’s bio-security ‘firewall’ fantasy are as obvious as they are disconcerting.

In closing, I would simply note that the “disaster of H1N1” is not, as Ms. Rempel and the MPC would have it, that “this virus is misnamed” and ILO operators have suffered economic losses. The disaster is that thousands of people in dozens of countries have contracted this virus and a number of people have died from it.

Sincerely,

Joe Dolecki
RR1, Alexander, Manitoba ROK OAO
Ph: 204-328-5385 (h) 204 727-9749 (o)
Oscar
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