NARCO NEWS-Al Giordano: How "The NAFTA" Flu Exploded

[magbana]

How “The NAFTA Flu” Exploded

http://www.narconews.com/Issue57/article3512.html

Smithfield Farms Fled US Environmental Laws to Open a Gigantic Pig
Farm in Mexico, and All We Got Was this Lousy Swine Flu

By Al Giordano Special to The Narco News Bulletin

April 29, 2009

US and Mexico authorities claim that neither knew about the “swine
flu” outbreak until April 24. But after hundreds of residents of a
town in Veracruz, Mexico, came down with its symptoms, the story had
already hit the Mexican national press by April 5. The daily La
Jornada reported:

Clouds of flies emanate from the rusty lagoons where the Carroll
Ranches business tosses the fecal wastes of its pig farms, and the
open-air contamination is already generating an epidemic of
respiratory infections in the town of La Gloria, in the Perote
Valley, according to Town Administrator Bertha Crisóstomo López.

The town has 3,000 inhabitants, hundreds of whom reported severe flu
symptoms in March.

CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta, reporting from Mexico, has identified a La
Gloria child who contracted the first case of identified “swine flu”
in February as “patient zero,” five-year-old Edgar Hernández, now a
survivor of the disease.

By April 15 – nine days before Mexican federal authorities of the
regime of President Felipe Calderon acknowledged any problem at all –
the local daily newspaper, Marcha, reported that a company called
Carroll Ranches was “the cause of the epidemic.”

La Jornada columnist Julio Hernández López connects the corporate
dots to explain how the Virginia-based Smithfield Farms came to
Mexico: In 1985, Smithfield Farms received what was, at the time, the
most expensive fine in history – $12.6 million – for violating the US
Clean Water Act at its pig facilities near the Pagan River in
Smithfield, Virginia, a tributary that flows into the Chesapeake Bay.
The company, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency
(EPA) dumped hog waste into the river.

It was a case in which US environmental law succeeded in forcing a
polluter, Smithfield Farms, to construct a sewage treatment plant at
that facility after decades of using the river as a mega-toilet. But
“free trade” opened a path for Smithfield Farms to simply move its
harmful practices next door into Mexico so that it could evade the
tougher US regulators.

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) came into effect on
January 1, 1994. That very same year Smithfield Farms opened the
“Carroll Ranches” in the Mexican state of Veracruz through a new
subsidiary corporation, “Agroindustrias de México.”

Unlike what law enforcers forced upon Smithfield Farms in the US, the
new Mexican facility – processing 800,000 pigs into bacon and other
products per year – does not have a sewage treatment plant.

According to Rolling Stone magazine, Smithfield slaughters an
estimated 27 million hogs a year to produce more than six billion
pounds of packaged pork products. (The Veracruz facility thus
constitutes about three percent of its total production.)

Reporter Jeff Teitz reported in 2006 on the conditions in
Smithfield’s US facilities (remember: what you are about to read
describes conditions that are more sanitary and regulated than those
in Mexico):

Smithfield’s pigs live by the hundreds or thousands in warehouse-like
barns, in rows of wall-to-wall pens. Sows are artificially
inseminated and fed and delivered of their piglets in cages so small
they cannot turn around. Forty fully grown 250-pound male hogs often
occupy a pen the size of a tiny apartment. They trample each other to
death. There is no sunlight, straw, fresh air or earth. The floors
are slatted to allow excrement to fall into a catchment pit under the
pens, but many things besides excrement can wind up in the pits:
afterbirths, piglets accidentally crushed by their mothers, old
batteries, broken bottles of insecticide, antibiotic syringes,
stillborn pigs—anything small enough to fit through the foot-wide
pipes that drain the pits. The pipes remain closed until enough
sewage accumulates in the pits to create good expulsion pressure;
then the pipes are opened and everything bursts out into a large
holding pond.

The temperature inside hog houses is often hotter than ninety
degrees. The air, saturated almost to the point of precipitation with
gases from shit and chemicals, can be lethal to the pigs. Enormous
exhaust fans run twenty-four hours a day. The ventilation systems
function like the ventilators of terminal patients: If they break
down for any length of time, pigs start dying.

Consider what happens when such forms of massive pork production move
to unregulated territory where Mexican authorities allow wealthy
interests to do business without adequate oversight, abusing workers
and the environment both. And there it is: The violence wrought by
NAFTA in clear and understandable human terms.

The so-called “swine flu” exploded because an environmental disaster
simply moved (and with it, took jobs from US workers) to Mexico where
environmental and worker safety laws, if they exist, are not enforced
against powerful multinational corporations.

False mental constructs of borders – the kind that cause US and
Mexican citizens alike to imagine a flu strain like this one invading
their nations from other lands – are taking a long overdue hit by the
current “swine flu” media frenzy. In this case, US-Mexico trade
policy created a time bomb in Veracruz that has already murdered more
than 150 Mexican citizens, and at least one child in the US, by
creating a gigantic Petri dish in the form pig farms to generate
bacon and ham for international sale.

None of that indicates that this flu strain was born in Mexico, but,
rather, that the North American Free Trade Agreement created the
optimal conditions for the flu to gestate and become, at minimum,
epidemic in La Gloria and, now, Mexico City, and threatens to become
international pandemic.

Welcome to the aftermath of “free trade.” Authorities now want you to
grab a hospital facemask and avoid human contact until the outbreak
hopefully blows over. And if you start to feel dizzy, or a flush with
fever, or other symptoms begin to molest you or your children,
remember this: The real name of this infirmity is “The NAFTA Flu,”
the first of what may well emerge as many new illnesses to emerge
internationally as the direct result of “free trade” agreements that
allow companies like Smithfield Farms to escape health, safety and
environmental laws.

[magbana]

1. UK Guardian: The Swine Flu Crisis Lays Bare the Meat Industry's Monstrous Power

TOPIC: IMPORTANT Guardian: Mike Davis: The swine flu crisis lays bare the meat
industry's monstrous power
http://groups.google.com/group/Cuba-Inside-Out/t/0210c0c5a2f23e77?hl=en
==============================================================================

== 1 of 1 ==
Date: Wed, Apr 29 2009 11:01 pm
From: "Karen Lee Wald"



This isn't easy reading, but very important if we are to understand where this virus is coming from and the difficulties in preventing a pandemic....Comments from medical researchers welcome...klw



http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/apr/27/swine-flu-mexico-health

The swine flu crisis lays bare the meat industry's monstrous power

The Mexico swine flu outbreak should alert us to a highly globalised industry with global political clout

Mike Davis
guardian.co.uk, Monday 27 April 2009

The Mexican swine flu, a genetic chimera probably conceived in the faecal
mire of an industrial pigsty, suddenly threatens to give the whole world a
fever. The initial outbreaks across North America reveal an infection
already travelling at higher velocity than did the last official pandemic
strain, the 1968 Hong Kong flu.

Stealing the limelight from our officially appointed assassin, H5N1, this
porcine virus is a threat of unknown magnitude. It seems less lethal than
Sars in 2003, but as an influenza it may be more durable than Sars. Given
that domesticated seasonal type-A influenzas kill as many one million people
a year, even a modest increment of virulence, especially if combined with
high incidence, could produce carnage equivalent to a major war.

Meanwhile, one of its first victims has been the consoling faith, long
preached by the World Health Organisation, that pandemics can be contained
by the rapid responses of medical bureaucracies, independent of the quality
of local public health. Since the initial H5N1 deaths in Hong Kong in 1997,
the WHO, with the support of most national health services, has promoted a
strategy focused on the identification and isolation of a pandemic strain
within its local radius of outbreak, followed by a thorough dousing of the
population with antivirals and (if available) vaccine.

An army of sceptics has contested this viral counter-insurgency approach,
pointing out that microbes can now fly around the world (quite literally in
the case of avian flu) faster than WHO or local officials can react to the
original outbreak. They also pointed to the primitive, often non-existent
surveillance of the interface between human and animal diseases. But the
mythology of bold, preemptive (and cheap) intervention against avian flu has
been invaluable to the cause of rich countries, like the US and UK, who
prefer to invest in their own biological Maginot lines rather than
dramatically increasing aid to epidemic frontlines overseas, as well as to
big pharma, which has battled developing-world demands for the generic,
public manufacture of critical antivirals like Roche's Tamiflu.

The swine flu may prove that the WHO/Centres for Disease Control version of
pandemic preparedness - without massive new investment in surveillance,
scientific and regulatory infrastructure, basic public health, and global
access to lifeline drugs - belongs to the same class of Ponzified risk
management as Madoff securities. It is not so much that the pandemic warning
system has failed as it simply doesn't exist, even in North America and the
EU.

Perhaps it is not surprising that Mexico lacks both capacity and political
will to monitor livestock diseases, but the situation is hardly better north
of the border, where surveillance is a failed patchwork of state
jurisdictions, and corporate livestock producers treat health regulations
with the same contempt with which they deal with workers and animals.
Similarly, a decade of urgent warnings by scientists has failed to ensure
the transfer of sophisticated viral assay technology to the countries in the
direct path of likely pandemics. Mexico has world-famous disease experts,
but it had to send swabs to a Winnipeg lab in order to ID the strain's
genome. Almost a week was lost as a consequence.

But no one was less alert than the disease controllers in Atlanta. According
to the Washington Post, the CDC did not learn about the outbreak until six
days after Mexico had begun to impose emergency measures. There should be no
excuses. The paradox of this swine flu panic is that, while totally
unexpected, it was accurately predicted. Six years ago, Science dedicated a
major story to evidence that "after years of stability, the North American
swine flu virus has jumped onto an evolutionary fasttrack".

Since its identification during the Great Depression, H1N1 swine flu had
only drifted slightly from its original genome. Then in 1998 a highly
pathogenic strain began to decimate sows on a farm in North Carolina and
new, more virulent versions began to appear almost yearly, including a
variant of H1N1 that contained the internal genes of H3N2 (the other type-A
flu circulating among humans).

Researchers interviewed by Science worried that one of these hybrids might
become a human flu (both the 1957 and 1968 pandemics are believed to have
originated from the mixing of bird and human viruses inside pigs), and urged
the creation of an official surveillance system for swine flu: an
admonition, of course, that went unheeded in a Washington prepared to throw
away billions on bioterrorism fantasies.

But what caused this acceleration of swine flu evolution? Virologists have
long believed that the intensive agricultural system of southern China is
the principal engine of influenza mutation: both seasonal "drift" and
episodic genomic "shift". But the corporate industrialisation of livestock
production has broken China's natural monopoly on influenza evolution.
Animal husbandry in recent decades has been transformed into something that
more closely resembles the petrochemical industry than the happy family farm
depicted in school readers.

In 1965, for instance, there were 53m US hogs on more than 1m farms; today,
65m hogs are concentrated in 65,000 facilities. This has been a transition
from old-fashioned pig pens to vast excremental hells, containing tens of
thousands of animals with weakened immune systems suffocating in heat and
manure while exchanging pathogens at blinding velocity with their fellow
inmates.


Last year a commission convened by the Pew Research Center issued a report
on "industrial farm animal production" that underscored the acute danger
that "the continual cycling of viruses . in large herds or flocks
increase opportunities for the generation of novel virus through mutation or
recombinant events that could result in more efficient human to human
transmission." The commission also warned that promiscuous antibiotic use in
hog factories (cheaper than humane environments) was sponsoring the rise of
resistant staph infections, while sewage spills were producing outbreaks of
E coli and pfiesteria (the protozoan that has killed 1bn fish in Carolina
estuaries and made ill dozens of fishermen).

Any amelioration of this new pathogen ecology would have to confront the
monstrous power of livestock conglomerates such as Smithfield Farms (pork
and beef) and Tyson (chickens). The commission reported systemic obstruction
of their investigation by corporations, including blatant threats to
withhold funding from cooperative researchers .

This is a highly globalised industry with global political clout. Just as
Bangkok-based chicken giant Charoen Pokphand was able to suppress enquiries
into its role in the spread of bird flu in southeast Asia, so it is likely
that the forensic epidemiology of the swine flu outbreak will pound its head
against the corporate stonewall of the pork industry.

This is not to say that a smoking gun will never be found: there is already
gossip in the Mexican press about an influenza epicentre around a huge
Smithfield subsidiary in Veracruz state. But what matters more (especially
given the continued threat of H5N1) is the larger configuration: the WHO's
failed pandemic strategy, the further decline of world public health, the
stranglehold of big pharma over lifeline medicines, and the planetary
catastrophe of industrialised and ecologically unhinged livestock
production.