Swine flu outbreak reveals the nasty side of the food industry

An article in the Daily Mail reveals the nasty side of the mass-production food industry, and its possible (although as yet unproven) link to the recent outbreak of swine flu.

Barricaded with double-perimeter high-voltage electric and razor-wire fences and protected by security lights and locked gates, the ominous-looking compound in the high plains five hours east of Mexico City might be mistaken for a prison – except that the inmates are pigs.

An unobtrusive sign announces that I have arrived at Site 8-2, a gigantic factory farm near the isolated hamlet of La Gloria where residents claim they are living at Ground Zero of the swine flu epidemic.

The desert wind is rank with a nauseating stench. Eight hangar-style buildings house 7,200 sows and their piglets but the complex is eerily silent except for an occasional grunt.

It is part of a chain of some 16 farms in this region that are owned by a Mexican company, Granjas Carroll de Mexico (GCM), in partnership with US-based Smithfield Foods, which, as the world’s largest pork producer, runs adverts in Britain about how it provides ‘good food in a responsible way’.

Last month, however, after hundreds of La Gloria villagers complained of flu-like symptoms, a five-year-old boy in the hamlet, Edgar Hernandez, was confirmed to be suffering from the virulent new strain of swine flu, H1N1.

Mexican officials are downplaying the epidemic, revising their estimate of deaths from the virus to 101 on Friday, a sharp drop from an earlier figure of 176, but the disease has taken a higher toll here than in any other country. And activists in La Gloria claim the pig farms are a fetid crucible for the new virus.

The company’s farming practices include burying dead pigs to rot in ‘biodigester’ containers. And pig urine and faeces are flushed into huge open-air pits, adjoining miles of cropland, which GCM disarmingly calls ‘lagoons’.




‘These farms are a disgrace,’ a subsistence farmer, Guadalupe Serrano Gaspar, 66, who is one of the leaders of the protests, said. ‘We believe they pollute the air and our groundwater and that they are directly responsible for this virus.’

Though environmentalists have criticised similar practices in the US, the La Gloria activists have not produced any scientific evidence of pollution in their little town (population 3,000).

Indeed, when I requested a tour of the pig sheds, GCM’s director general, Victor Ochoa, politely refused, saying that it is people who are a threat to pigs and not the other way round.

‘Pigs cannot transmit viral infections to humans,’ he said. ‘But it is a scientific fact that swine can pick up the flu virus from humans. How do I know you don’t have the flu? Or you could be carrying foot-and-mouth disease that will infect my pigs.’

Some scientists sharply disagree, however. They argue that in damp, cramped conditions, swine viruses may mutate into contagious new strains.

British microbiologist Professor Hugh Pennington said: ‘It is entirely possible to transfer the flu virus both ways between species. Flu itself probably got into pigs from humans during the big pandemic in 1918. So it’s possible this [epidemic] is the pigs’ revenge.’

Experts are divided on the manure-filled lagoons. Professor Pennington said: ‘These lagoons and the accompanying smell simply mean there are lots of pigs around. You would need direct and prolonged contact with an animal with the virus to contract it.’

But Dr Michael Greger, director of public health and agriculture at the US Humane Society, said: ‘There is evidence that flies landing on animal waste can spread the flu virus for miles around.

‘Pig waste lagoons are a great danger to human health. There are many ways – the wind for example – that illness can be spread from them. In the case of this current swine flu, the virus could easily escape from factory farm facilities.’

Sows at weaning farms such as Site 8-2 live with their piglets in cages so small that they have room to lie down but not turn around, a company spokesman said.

They stand on grates over a water-filled pit. Once a week, the urine and manure is flushed into the lagoon, which has a clay lining that the company says prevents any seepage.

Half a mile away, I found Site 8-3, where sows are transferred after their piglets are weaned. Here 16,200 of them were being fattened last week for slaughter.

There are 18 sheds, connected in a similar arrangement to Site 8-2, to an outdoor cesspit. Behind the pit, there was another trench, the size perhaps of one-and-a-half football fields.

Clouds of dirt, whipped by the wind, blew in my face and the smell was so overpowering I started to vomit. Ventilation pipes rose from a concrete slab, covering the ‘biodigester’ into which the dead pigs allegedly are dumped.

A goatherd, Jose Benitez, who was tending his flock with his eight-year-old grandson on the track to the farm said: ‘When pigs get sick and die, they bury them there. I cannot handle the smell.

‘I do not think this is a good idea with all the illness that is around.’

There's more at the link.

The tragedy is, we've prevented such facilities from operating in many parts of the USA due to stringent local, State and national health regulations - but our appetite for cheap meat remains insatiable. Hence, companies simply export their facilities to less regulated nations, leaving them with the pollution, whilst shipping the end product back to the USA to make their money.

It bears thinking about . . . and fixing. The problem is, fixing it will mean spending money on the problem - money the companies won't have unless they charge more for their meat: and US consumers aren't willing (so far) to pay more for their food in order to ensure that it's more humanely and hygienically produced.

What to do? How to do it? I know I'm willing to pay more to fix the problem, but many others aren't. Do readers have any ideas?

Meanwhile, local villagers continue to breathe the stench of the effluent produced by the demands of our affluent society . . .

Peter