News articles abound about the probable source of the swine fever, sorry, influenza A (H1N1), (the Grumpy Vegan likes “Mad Swine Disease),” including Huffington Post and today’s Graun, which can’t help itself to call the op ed, “The Pig’s Revenge.” It is, of course, more like retribution than revenge. We wanted cheap food, which turned out to be expensive in more ways than one: protein conversion, environmental degradation and the lives of billions of animals.
The new swine flu could have emerged in a myriad number of ways, passing between any number of birds and pigs and people, at locations across North America, during its evolutionary journey. It may well prove impossible to pinpoint exactly where it first emerged or became infectious to people. But most of its genes are almost certainly part of a North American industrial virus lineage long expected to produce pandemic variants like this one.
“We haven’t found evidence of infected pigs,” said Ian Lipkin, a Columbia University epidemiologist and member of the World Health Organization’s surveillance network. “But even if we never find that smoking pig, we can surmise that this is probably where it came from.”
Wired reports.
What the Grumpy Vegan wants to know is when are agribusiness interests going to be held accountable? If a bunch of vegans had caused mad swine disease we’d be all listed on FBI’s Most Wanted by now. Wait for us to be blamed because the public and the media didn’t pay us enough attention. Not that the Grumpy Vegan wants to see anyone sick (and having just recovered from a bout of the virus veganitius insanitus) himself, it is somewhat gratifying seeing society catch up with what folks like Rachel Carson and Ruth Harrison and thousands of other animal advocates have been saying for more than 40 years about factory farming and its negative impact on human health, animal welfare and environmental degradation.
