By Michael Greger, MD on September 7, 2009

The Flu Goes Back to School

You may be joining friends and family today for one of the last cookouts of the season. On this Meatless Monday, why not wow them with a meat-free feast? Efforts like these bring us one step closer to ending the inhumane treatment of farm animals. Dr. Michael Greger is here to share his expertise on the Swine Flu and explain its connection to factory farms. Dr. Greger recently worked with HSUS to create the DVD, Flu Factories: Tracing the Origins of the Swine Flu Pandemic. Be the fifth or tenth reader to tweet @CrazySexyLife with a link to this blog and win a free copy!

The World Health Organization (WHO) maintains that billions of people may become infected with swine flu. “This virus travels at an unbelievable, almost unheard of speed,” the WHO Director-General was quoted as saying last week. The “most worrying fact,” according to the Director-General, is “that 40 percent of the fatalities concern young adults — in good health — who die of a viral fever in five to seven days.”

Though swine flu has likely infected more than a million Americans, the virus got a late start. For reasons still not well understood, flu viruses thrive best in the wintertime. Swine flu’s emergence in the spring likely limited transmission in the Northern hemisphere in the ensuing summer months, leaving most people susceptible for the upcoming flu season. This leaves officials concerned that there may be a resurgence of the virus this fall, before a vaccine is widely available.

In a world in which millions continue to die of scourges such as AIDS and tuberculosis, though, why is there so much concern about this so-called swine flu? Because the last time a whole flu virus apparently jumped species and triggered a pandemic, it went on to become the deadliest plague in human history, the influenza pandemic of 1918.

Still, only about 1000 people have died so far from swine flu. Although any virus that kills scores of children can hardly be described as “mild,” the current pandemic has not been much worse than the regular seasonal flu so far, but this may just be the first wave. The 1918 pandemic was apparently relatively mild, too—at first. Compared to what was to come later, the first “wave” in summer 1918 hardly registered a blip, but then it came back with a vengeance in the fall to kill tens of millions of people.

Once a pandemic virus emerges, it is nearly impossible to stop. Swine flu has evolved into the first pandemic of the 21st century and almost certainly will not be the last. Attention must therefore be turned to preventing the emergence of viruses with pandemic potential in the first place.

The industrialization of poultry production has been blamed for the unprecedented changes taking place among bird flu viruses in recent decades. Similar changes in the pig industry have likely contributed to the emergence of the current pandemic, as documented in our new video feature Flu Factories: Tracing the Origins of the Swine Flu Pandemic at HumaneSociety.org/swineflu.

We need to end the long-distance live transport of farm animals, which can spread these diseases around the world; we need to follow the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal’s recommendations to abolish extreme confinement practices such as crates for pregnant pigs, as they’re already doing in Europe, and six states so far here in the U.S.; and ultimately, we need to follow the recommendation of the American Public Health Association, the largest association of public health professionals in the world, and declare: no more factory farms.

Studies have shown that measures as simple as providing straw for pigs can significantly cut down on swine flu transmission rates, presumably because then they don’t have the immune crippling stress of lying on bare concrete slats their whole lives. Such a simple measure, yet we deny them even this modicum of mercy—to their detriment, and, potentially, to ours as well.

 

 

   
 

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