OK--You can't get swine flu from eating pork, yet it comes from pig farms? Please someone explain.

[panader0]

Does it come from pigs or what? There's a lot of wild pigs here, (javelina), and the other night they got in my trash, and I picked it all up, and then thought--I'm exposed! Just kidding, but I did wash my hands.

[hedgehog]

1. Check out the links here:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x3851532

[Alameda]

22. This is a great link! Everyone should read it.

Of all I've read about this, this offers the most credible explanation of why and what is happening. Thanks!

[bluebellbaby]

2. If you were to eat the pig without cooking it maybe you might get it...

But that's stretching it a bit...the stomach acids would most likely kill it...

Most pork is cooked or smoked...killing any pathogens...

[panader0]

8. So the origin is pigs.

Yet it is spread from human to human by contact. How is it spread from pig to man?

[bluebellbaby]

11. I think it's been stated as close contact and unsanitary conditions

Not washing your hands...I guess!

[mrs_p]

17. respiratory secretions

we have to inhale pig secretions to become infected

[Canuckistanian]

13. Eating raw pork would be thousands of times more dangerous

Trichinosis, ringworms and other parasites.....

I'd rather die from the flu, thanks.

[moose65]

3. Cooking kills the virus

I read this on the CDC website earlier today. I don't think anyone eats raw pork, so if it's cooked to an internal temperature of 160 or so, that will kill all the viruses and bacteria that might be present in the meat.

http://www.cdc.gov/swineflu/key_facts.htm

[OhioChick]

7. You're right....I heard it had to reach 160 degrees. n/t

[BuyingThyme]

4. That's where they keep the pigs.

There's also one in Alaska.

[Muttocracy]

5. respiratory vs. digestive systems? just a guess. nt

[nadinbrzezinski]

6. Two things

you eat raw pork? If you do you got a far better chance of thrychinosis, unless it is the lungs you chose to eat raw

I am presuming you are cooking it

[panader0]

10. Of course I cook my pork, and very well too, always have

But it doesn't come from eating pork, it comes from human contact. How did the human get it to begin with? It seems that an earlier post connects it a pig farm.

[nadinbrzezinski]

18. An earlier post connects it

but also at times swine, porkys have influenza that does jump the species barrier, ti is a mutation

And pigs are pretty good at mixing the genetic tracks as they have receptors for both human and bird flues as well

This happens every so often, and 1918 was a variant of this one, so were 57 and 68

Imagine if you will, the pork is a blender, you throw in the ingredients and every so often you get a nasty frankestein virus that can and does jump the species barrier and kills people

Now I wasn't making fun of you, honest, NPR actually covered this, is it safe to eat pork story last night, and four countries have banned imports from infected areas

[SoCalDem]

29. Continued contact with the animals..

Sometimes it makes people sick, and other times, prolonged exposure tranfsers immunity..


Milkmaids used to not get cow-pox (small pox) but the general public was very susceptible...

Dr Jenner figured it out

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Jenner

Smallpox

Around this time smallpox was greatly feared, as one in three of those who contracted the disease died, and those who survived were often badly disfigured. Voltaire, a few years later, recorded that 60% of people caught smallpox, with 20% of the population dying of it. In the years following 1770 there were at least six people in England and Germany (Sevel, Jensen, Jesty 1774, Rendell, Plett 1791) who had successfully tested the possibility of using the cowpox vaccine as an immunization for smallpox in humans. <6> For example, Dorset farmer, Benjamin Jesty, had successfully induced immunity in his wife and two children with cowpox during a smallpox epidemic in 1774, but it was not until Jenner's work some twenty years later that the procedure became widely understood. Indeed it is generally believed that Jenner was unaware of Jesty's success and arrived at his conclusions independently


Jenner's Initial Theory
In fact he thought the initial source of infection was a disease of horses, called "the grease", and that this was transferred to cows by farmworkers, transformed, and then manifested as cowpox. From that point on he was correct, the complication probably arose from coincidence.

Noting the common observation that milkmaids did not generally get smallpox, Jenner theorized that the pus in the blisters which milkmaids received from cowpox (a disease similar to smallpox, but much less virulent) protected the milkmaids from smallpox. He may have had the advantage of hearing stories of Benjamin Jesty and others who deliberately arranged cowpox infection of their families, and then noticed a reduced smallpox risk in those families.

On 14 May 1796, Jenner tested his theory by inoculating James Phipps,{1788-1853} a young boy of 8 years old, with material from the cowpox blisters of the hand of Sarah Nelmes, a milkmaid who had caught cowpox from a cow called Blossom<7>, whose hide hangs on the wall of the library at St George's medical school (now in Tooting). Blossom's hide commemorates one of the school's most renowned alumni. Phipps was the 17th case described in Jenner's first paper on vaccination.

Jenner inoculated Phipps with cowpox pus in both arms on the same day. The inoculation was accomplished by scraping the pus from Nelmes' blisters onto a piece of wood then transferring this to Phipps' arms. This produced a fever and some uneasiness but no great illness. Later, he injected Phipps with variolous material, which would have been the routine attempt to produce immunity at that time. No disease followed. Jenner reported that later the boy was again challenged with variolacious material and again showed no sign of infection.

Known: that smallpox was more dangerous than variolation and cowpox less dangerous than variolation.

The hypothesis tested: That infection with cowpox would give immunity to smallpox.

The test: If variolation failed to produce an infection, Phipps was shown to be immune to smallpox.

The consequence: Immunity to smallpox could be induced much more safely.

He continued his research and reported it to the Royal Society, who did not publish the initial report. After improvement and further work, he published a report of twenty-three cases. Some of his conclusions were correct, and some erroneous—modern microbiological and microscopic methods would make this easier to repeat. The medical establishment, as cautious then as now, considered his findings for some time before accepting them. Eventually vaccination was accepted, and in 1840 the British government banned variolation- the use of the smallpox itself- and provided vaccination- using cowpox- free of charge.

[Tangerine LaBamba]

9. Unless the wild pigs

sneeze or cough on you, you're safe.

But, SERIES, I'd wear rubber gloves picking up the trash next time the wild pigs get into it (there's a phrase I have never written before), and drop them in the trash when I was done.

Where do you live?

[panader0]

15. Sierra Vista, about 15 miles N of Mexico in high desert, thick mesquite trees

Miller peak is 9650 feet, right outside the window.

[Occam Bandage]

12. Er, you do cook your food, right?

You oughtn't eat pork raw anyway.

[NMDemDist2]

14. errrr...... javalinas are NOT pigs or swine at all

they just kinda look like em

[panader0]

20. Check Wikipedia

Javelina are members of the same family as swine.

[mnhtnbb]

16. CDC facts on swine flu

http://www.cdc.gov/swineflu/key_facts.htm

[tammywammy]

19. I would definitely recommend cutting back on

rolling around naked in uncooked bacon. At least until this blows over.

:P

[paulsby]

24. well

my friday night just got shot to hell. oh well

[tammywammy]

26. It's a tough sacrifice for many these day.

:cry:

[dweller]

27. btw, if you're not busy friday nite now

let me know...

;)

dp

[nilram]

21. pigs don't cover their mouths when they sneeze

that's why we call them 'pigs'.

[captainjack08]

23. Because it is probably a man-made release...

...of a biological weapon created by some country's military.

The 1918 avian influenza started on a military base at Fort Riley Kansas and Queens New York right near the end of World War I

The 1975 swine Flu epidemic started on the Fort Dix military base right after Nixon is impeached and as Nixon, Rumsfeld, Cheney and Kissinger try to worm their way out of Church hearings into CIA domestic abuses
http://www.birdflumanual.com/articles/swine_flu.asp
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/26/washington/26cia-timeline.html?_r=1&ref=washington

The 2003 SARS epidemic started in Asia/China around the time of the Iraq war

And in 2009 as Cheney and Rumsfeld AGAIN are being grilled on torture and other abuses and Mexico is in the middle of a serious drug war we get another pandemic scare days after we are told that Fort Detrick has lost vials of biological weapons it cannot account for. Not to say Cheney and Rumsfeld did this but could someone be taking a page out of history and use flu pandemic as a political weapon? Yes.

Do flu viruses have a natural affinity for wars and political controversies? Doubt that. They are likely political weapons being used by the intelligence agencies of governments.

2+2=?

[nadinbrzezinski]

25. Did we start doing this shit in the 1500s?

I only ask since we have these things happening almost like clockwork every two generations or so since oh the 1500

By the way, what was the cause for the 1957 outbreak and the 1968 outbreak?

Take a course in virology... may help

[captainjack08]

28. Disease has been used as a biological weapon for 1000s of years...

"During the Middle Ages, victims of the bubonic plague were used for biological attacks, often by flinging corpses and excrement over castle wallsusing catapults. In 1346, the bodies of Mongol warriors of the Golden Horde who had died of plague were thrown over the walls of the besieged Crimean city of Kaffa (now Theodosia). It has been speculated that this operation may have been responsible for the advent of the Black Death in Europe."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_warfare

It's only been since about 1947 and the creation of the CIA(and coincidently the UFO) that the thoroughly domesticated American mind has been trained to believe that there are no conspiracies and that the world is too complicated and mysterious for the unwashed masses to comprehend.

Take a course on world history... may help

[nadinbrzezinski]

30. Yeah and your point

the fact is that these pandemics happen like clockwork

In fact, they found a nice little one in a fossil going back oh 1, 000, 000 years

Read that number again

1,000,000

Here is the deal we humans and them pesky viruses have been co-evolving for at least a million years

We have also had these things happen every so often, almost like clockwork

We used to say that it was god's will

Now it is the evil guv'ment

Same magical thinking, EXACTLY same magical thinking

Oh by the way, we were manipulating viruses before we knew of them? Or rather before we could

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_mosaic_virus

[TheMadMonk]

31. Anywhere where people are crowded together,...

...such as a military base, increases the likelyhood of a novel (and often hard to transmit) disease getting a foothold in a community. Small random mutations may work towards making such a disease more transmissible. The greater the number of hosts the more likely this is to occur. Once this has happened, transmission by casual contact becomes probable and it spreads into the wider community with the potential to become a true pandemic.

Now to address the true stupidity of your conspiracy theory.

Wartime military bases are not the cleanest of places (lots of mud and worse) and the grunts are definitely packed in tight.

1918: No one had the knowledge to create or even isolate and purify significant quantities of disease causing pathogens. State of the art was still on a par with lobbing plague rats over the wall.

1975: Still no real ability to create to order. At best we had the ability to identify and possibly isolate "bugs" with "desireable" traits from what nature had to offer.

2003: Given how hard to transmit this pathogen was, It's a piss poor excuse for a bioweapon.

2009: It turns up in a small town on top of mega pig farm with less than exemplary waste handling policies. Cheney et al may well have created it, but only as an inadvertent (read that as who gives a shit for dumb Mexicans) byproduct of their economic policies.


If you're going to indulge in conspiracy theories, pick ones that have at least some basis in reality.

[captainjack08]

32. Do you have some list of official dates...

...for when world goverments learned to weaponize viruses? Did they write that in a book somewhere conclusively along with the dates and manner of creation of all of the other top secret stuff they never tell us about so that now you and the rest of the world knows what they were up to? You learned when in reality they gained the ability to do something versus when they told us they could do something? Glad you have that all figured out and know beyond doubt they wouldn't lie to us.

It's great minds such as yours that will help America avoid future Iraq wars, Wall Street Ponzi schemes, stolen elections, illegal Torture, ilegal Renditions, human experimentation, Niger Doc forgeries, Abu Ghraibs, Pat Tillmans... you'll be the first to see it coming!

Thanks for your hard work and efforts to make the world a better, brighter and more curious and more intelligent place.

[TheMadMonk]

33. No, but I do have a fair layman's knowledge of the science involved.

We simply have not have the technical ability to do what you have claimed until relatively recently.

And it's great minds like yours, fixating upon patently ridicuolus ideas, that gave Cheney et al free reign for eight years.