Swine Flu and Industrial Agriculture
There’s been a great uptick in interest over the past couple of years in the environmental and ethical problems with the ways animals are conventionally raised in modern industrial agriculture settings. That, combined with the rise of swine flu, has naturally led to interest in the issue of whether or not the emergence and spread of the H1N1 virus is linked to pig Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) in some damning way. Grist is hosting an interesting debate on the subject, with Tom Philpott making the case for links and Merritt Clifton pushing back and saying the evidence really isn’t in.
I’m not an expert, but my understanding of the general issue of animal-to-human flu strain “jumps” is that it is related to agriculture, but not necessarily to the CAFO question. The reason these transmission cases typical involve chickens (”avian flu”) or pigs (”swine flu”) is that these are the animals most commonly raised by man. And chicken and pig viruses are subject to animal-to-human transmission in part because it’s common for people and their animals to be living in extremely close quarters in the developed world. It’s true that strict adherence to humane treatment of free range animals would mitigate that risk. But the locus of the problem is less the state-of-the-art developed world CAFOs than it is developing world agricultural practices.
That’s in general. Of course in general these things also usually happen in Asia, where those practices are widespread. Since this particular flu arose in Mexico, where conditions are different, it’s not unreasonable to think that the circumstances of origin are different.
30 Responses to “Swine Flu and Industrial Agriculture”
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April 30th, 2009 at 2:33 pm
Thanks for not taking the reactionary PETA position. Since these viruses are specifically NOT originating in the U.S., I think it is silly to even begin to discuss U.S. agricultural practices as being part of the cause of this problem. Instead, we should be trying to export our practicies to the developing world.
April 30th, 2009 at 2:42 pm
Flu pandemics have been happening forever, and well before the advent of modern industrial farming. There’s no evidence that they’re becoming more common. What in the world is there to discuss? I really hate when people try and foist their politics on the crisis of the day. Haven’t we had enough of that the last eight years?
April 30th, 2009 at 2:43 pm
Our practices have a lot of issues too. Overuse of antibiotics and sewage lagoons just to name two.
April 30th, 2009 at 2:47 pm
“And chicken and pig viruses are subject to animal-to-human transmission in part because it’s common for people and their animals to be living in extremely close quarters in the developed world.”
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the most annoying typo’s are the ones that completely change the meaning of the words being used.
April 30th, 2009 at 2:47 pm
Actually I think there might be a biological reason why it is birds and pigs that cause these issues. My understanding of the basics are that bird viruses don’t tend to have a high rate of success in infecting humans. But they can infect pigs. In the pigs, they often do mutate into something that can infect humans. There is some effect of pigs being positioned between birds and humans that greatly increases the risk of these flus becoming something that can infect people. Then the question becomes how virulent and deadly is it?
April 30th, 2009 at 2:48 pm
We did. The majority of Hog farming in Mexico is in U.S. owned CAFO’s. No one knows enough about the epicenter here to state anything definitively, but you are the one jumping to conclusions.
April 30th, 2009 at 2:51 pm
Granted. I meant exporting whatever our domestic policies were for limiting viral outbreaks. Criteria for culling, quarantining, hygiene, etc. I know our domestic animal farmers have their own many flaws, but they seem to be good at preventing the start of terrifying pandemics, so lets give them props for that.
April 30th, 2009 at 2:52 pm
If our pig and chicken farming operations are so inherently healthy, then we should be able to stop the heavy vaccine and antibiotic usage. And absolutely no diseases will ever spread to the workers in those farms, since they have no close contact with the animals at all.
April 30th, 2009 at 2:55 pm
Maybe it’s all that time I spent on my uncle’s ranch 40 years ago when I was growing up, but until the past several years, I pretty much assumed that the animals we turned into food were at least living a reasonably decent life for a cow/pig/chicken/etc. before we turned them into burgers, bacon, and Buffalo wings.
I’m no PETA type, but it strikes me that that’s a reasonable sort of implicit compact with our livestock: in the end we’ll kill and eat you, but at least in the meantime you’ll be living the animal equivalent of the good life.
But to treat an animal like a cog in a machine for the entirety of its existence, and then slaughter it, strikes me as fundamentally appalling, even if there are no consequences to us for treating our animals so brutally.
And even aside from humane issues, those responsible for the CAFO operations ought to be responsible for the offal produced by their livestock, at least over and above the concentrations that would be present in the case of free-range livestock, where one might reasonably rely on the capacity of the land to absorb the fertilizer.
April 30th, 2009 at 2:59 pm
[...] http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2009/04/swine-flu-and-industrial-agriculture.php [...]
April 30th, 2009 at 3:00 pm
TJ, low-tech, others-
All fine and good. Except that there’s not a shred of evidence that any of that has anything to do with swine flu.
Maybe I’m just being cranky, but I wish people could have debates without trying to stitch the news of the day into their message.
April 30th, 2009 at 3:04 pm
US CAFOs are a fucking abomination and should be destroyed. The only reason there’s not a greater outcry is that fucking corporate whores in Southern legislatures passed laws banning photography inside those places by animals rights groups.
My understanding is that “gourmet” Smithfield Ham of Virginia was a partner in the Mexican pig farms where this virus allegedly originated. So I agree with Ed Marshall at 6.
I suspect that the extreme overcrowding of CAFO encourages the development of new disease strains — both because of transmission from pig to pig and possibly because of the antibiotic supplements.
April 30th, 2009 at 3:07 pm
Well there was that whole mad cow thing. Not exactly a terror inducing pandemic compared to this, but it was directly caused by processes used by (among others) American farmers.
The culling, quarentine, and testing I can get behind. Even then, our domestic testing has been weakened by the various lobbies.
April 30th, 2009 at 3:07 pm
Re why Smithfield’s share price is dropping, see
http://www.rockymounttelegram.com/news/state/smithfield-shares-drop-on-worries-about-swine-flu-571867.html
I’m sure we can depend upon the clean Mexican police to get to the bottom of things.
April 30th, 2009 at 3:12 pm
I wonder if PETA will pass around photos of that Mexican farm and of those dead Mexican children. No doubt it has been sealed off at this point for “investigation”.
I also wonder how deep a hole would open up in Smithfield’s share price if a consumer boycott got rolling.
Yes, by all means let’s drop that term “swine flu”.
April 30th, 2009 at 3:14 pm
TJ, low-tech, others-
All fine and good. Except that there’s not a shred of evidence that any of that has anything to do with swine flu.
Tru dat. What I said was that our treatment of livestock was appalling, irrespective of any potential consequences to us. So I’m not assuming any connection to swine flu.
April 30th, 2009 at 3:26 pm
MRSA
I’m kind of surprised that somebody in a position of influence hasn’t woven the CAFO-MRSA connection in to this discussion. Swine Flu is, at the end of the day, the flu after all. The larger medical threat from raising all these pigs in CAFOs is that conditions warrant mass use of antibiotics which leads to the evolution of Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. MRSA is a much bigger medical threat than Swine Flu and the link to CAFOs is much clearer.
April 30th, 2009 at 3:30 pm
According to this report, Smithfield did have an outbreak of swine flu at its farm in Romania — albeit a different form.
Also, the Pig Baron Joseph Lutar III tells his side of the story:
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-wellbeing/health-news/for-la-gloria-the-stench-of-blame-is-from-pig-factories-1675809.html
April 30th, 2009 at 3:30 pm
US CAFOs are a fucking abomination and should be destroyed. The only reason there’s not a greater outcry is that fucking corporate whores in Southern legislatures passed laws banning photography inside those places by animals rights groups.
There’s plenty of that footage. Meat.org at least used to have some preachy video narrated by what sounded like a Baldwin. The images are horrifying. The reason there’s little outcry is because no one wants to know what he’s eating.
April 30th, 2009 at 3:33 pm
RoboticGhost:
DaveNYC said back on comment#3:
I assume he was referring to the same issue as you. Everyone agrees that the overuse of antibiotics is contributing to the rise of new resistant strains. But that isn’t related to the Swine Flu or Matthew Y’s post.
I think the point most of the commentors on my side of the issue have been saying is that yes, livestock farms have a lot of problems, but there isn’t a link to H1N1 and the CAFOs. Especially not between American CAFOs and H1N1. Since the swine & avian viruses are coming from developing countries, perhaps we should be comparing the differences between our livestock farms and their livestock farms to see how we can help reduce the threat of H1N1 coming from the developing world in the future.
April 30th, 2009 at 3:44 pm
Interestingly, another course of action would be to further automate animal husbandry. If you’re never near the animals, you can’t catch anything from them. It would lead to less compassion for the animals, since they would be out of sight.
April 30th, 2009 at 3:46 pm
Asian flu used to be the generic name for flu. Chinese agricultural techniques involving hog especially were widely considered to be the incubator of flu strains. Somebody might know how true this really was as far as the impact on world wide pandemics.
I will hazard a guess that industrial animal techniques are no more likely to be the incubator of flu strains than traditional methods. Perhaps less so. Until the big one. Whenever and whatever that is. The massive use of vaccines in industrial agriculture present what seems an obvious risk of vaccine resistant strains. Then again obvious may not be correct.
April 30th, 2009 at 3:58 pm
Aww man, why did I just order my burrito with extra chorizo?
April 30th, 2009 at 4:08 pm
Matthew in Austin,
Fair enough. I guess my point was that I wish somebody would use this popular news cycle item to highlight a serious problem that doesn’t get enough press in the MSM.
While there isn’t a direct link (yet) between H1N1 and CAFOs of any sort, that doesn’t mean there isn’t a case to be made for highlighting the probability of hideous diseases germinating in our animal food supply. Raising more pigs means more chance for mutation for viruses and bacteria, especially when they are raised in unhealthy conditions. That’s a no-brainer. H1N1 may not have originated in a CAFO or in the US, but that’s just a matter of chance.
In a more perfect world, every CAFO producing pigs would be sealed off from any contact with other animals. But what are the chances of that happening? CAFOs are not inspected in the US they way they should be, let alone on Myanmar or some other hellhole where they don’t give a fig about best practices. Folks anywhere who raise and slaughter sentient beings by the truckload in the manner that they do are morally diminished no matter how you look at it. I highly doubt that, absent some serious heavy-handedness by the world’s governments, that scum would spend a penny more than they need to.
All this swine flu business is overblown, of course, but one day it might not be.
April 30th, 2009 at 4:11 pm
I would tend to hold off blaming CAFO’s until the scientific evidence is in. And even then, since flu’s are as old as time, from a public policy perspective we’d still have to evaluate the probability and nastiness of flu’s (flues?) from mechanized farming versus more traditional methods.
For example, is it “better” to have one million hogs in an industrial farm, or 100 hogs on 10 thousand farms? The concentrated farm might lead to more swine-swine mutations, but fewer chances for a jump to humans. The decentralized farm would have less chance for swine-swine mutations, but more chance for swine-human mutations. I’m not sure what the conclusion from that balancing equation would be. And if these flu’s are inevitable, then maybe we as consumers are to blame for eating so much pork (and thus requiring the feeding and care of animals) regardless of how the animals are raised.
That said, those CAFO’s are pretty disgusting and have issues that go far beyond the implications for the flu.
April 30th, 2009 at 4:31 pm
I doubt CAFOs really make much difference either way. But one thing does seem to matter: the number of pigs. About half of our major pandemics have started in China. But half of the world’s pigs live in China. If a disease starts in pigs, then it’s likely that it will start where the most pigs live. On the opposite end of the spectrum, we don’t see swine pandemics starting in Saudi Arabia. The issue isn’t so much how we raise pigs, it’s that we raise them at all. That said, I love bacon and I guess the occasional pandemic is the price I have to pay if I want my bacon.
April 30th, 2009 at 4:50 pm
Actually I think there might be a biological reason why it is birds and pigs that cause these issues. My understanding of the basics are that bird viruses don’t tend to have a high rate of success in infecting humans. But they can infect pigs. In the pigs, they often do mutate into something that can infect humans. There is some effect of pigs being positioned between birds and humans that greatly increases the risk of these flus becoming something that can infect people. Then the question becomes how virulent and deadly is it?
That’s pretty much correct, but I just want to add a few details.
The flu enters cells using the coat protein hemagglutinin (the H of H1N1, or H5N1, etc., (the N is another protein, neuraminidase, that’s involved in virus release from cells) with the numbers being different alleles of H and N). Hemagglutinin binds to a molecule called sialic acid on the surface of cells, which allows the virus enter by a process called endocytosis. Once the virus is in the cell, it replicates its chromosomes and repackages everything to release progeny viruses. The thing is, humans and birds have different types of sialic acid (for the cognoscenti, bird proteins are sialylated by alpha-2,3 linkages while human proteins are alpha-2,6 linkages), and a given HA can bind to only one sialic acid type, so it’s unlikely that avian flu will jump directly to humans and cause a pandemic since bird flu won’t be able to enter our cells very efficiently. Pigs have both types of sialic acid, so it’s conceivable that a pig cell can be infected with any combination of bird, human, and swine flu at the same time (that’s why pigs are sometimes referred to as mixing vessels). At this point it’s possible for bird, human, and swine flu chromosomes to get all mixed up and packaged into the same virus particle, which could create a strain of the flu we’ve never seen before. Indeed, this seems to be the case for this strain of the flu:
The point of all this is that it seems unlikely for these CAFO things to have been the culprit here. There needs to have been some contact between birds and pigs, and that probably wouldn’t have happened in a CAFO. It’s much more likely to have come from a very poorly run farm where humans, birds, and pigs are all in close contact. This has actually happened before in China; a pretty bad strain of the flu arose from a farm where bird cages were placed on top of pig cages, and basically the pigs were wallowing around in bird shit.
April 30th, 2009 at 7:59 pm
Matt means “developing world” in the second paragraph, right? People and their animals live in close quarters in the developing world.
April 30th, 2009 at 8:16 pm
The larger medical threat from raising all these pigs in CAFOs is that conditions warrant mass use of antibiotics which leads to the evolution of Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. MRSA is a much bigger medical threat than Swine Flu and the link to CAFOs is much clearer.
I recently attended a seminar by Dr. Peter Moeller, a NOAA scientist who has cracked the problem of antibiotic resistance. It’s an absolutely fascinating scientific discovery that has already been proven effective against MRSA. He claims that it has worked 100% of the time against every bacteria tested. FDA approval is estimated to take 10 years. The implications of this discovery are enormous; from boat hull fouling to medical devices. This compound can already be produced synthetically for about $3 a kg.
May 1st, 2009 at 10:39 am
He claims that it has worked 100% of the time against every bacteria tested.
Read the article – that is amazing! Why hasn’t that been a banner headline that we all know about? Death from hospital-induced infection has had me scared of surgery at hospitals for years now, and something like this could virtually eliminate that possibility. WOW.