Posted: 2009-06-20 04:19
Photo Courtesy of hmerinomx/Flickr
by Talli Nauman
By the time the World Health Organization (WHO) announced the 2009 influenza virus pandemic on June 11, the country of the flu’s discovery was just beginning to get back on its feet.
Mexico today is coming out of an emotional and financial tailspin caused by draconian measures to prevent the spread of the infectious disease.
Among the early, isolated but alarming outbreaks around the world of the new strain of the A(H1N1) influenza, beginning in late April 2009, the most cases and fatalities confirmed were in Mexico. Verifying 2,059 cases of infected people out of the approximately 5,300 substantiated in 30 nations worldwide by mid-May, Mexico drew national and international attention for the previously unknown virus strain. Authorities’ declaration of an “epidemic” and then an “imminent pandemic” fueled an environmental health scare of staggering socio-economic impact in the country, weighing heavily on top of existing fiscal woes and survivors’ heartbreak over 56 lost loved-ones, by that time.
Mexican President Felipe Calderon declared a national alert tantamount to the 2002 anti-terrorist U.S. Homeland Security decree in its broad-brush abridgements of protections for privacy and civil liberties, such as waiving search-warrant requirements and cancelling travelers’ right to move about freely.
In Mexico City, the government allowed private workplaces to remain open but closed all schools, eating establishments (except for take-out orders), public institutions such as museums, and finally even government offices. They remained shuttered through most of the first week of May. More than 500 mass meetings and hundreds of smaller ones were postponed. The national sport of soccer was played on a field off-limits to spectators.
With officials warning against travel and promoting the use of surgical masks to prevent the spread of the viral disease, the devastating effects on Mexico’s economy ranged from entertainment business losses -- reportedly $57 million a day in the capital -- to cessation nationwide of the traditional greeting kiss on the cheek. More than fever and coughs, fear and tension gripped residents across the country.
The total death toll attributable to the new A(H1N1) was a mere drop in the bucket, compared to the 36,000 who die every year from other flu strains in the United States alone. But the scare raised the issue of industrial hog farming security, since the strain is officially classified as a recent outgrowth of the H1N1 virus dubbed swine flu, which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had first isolated in pigs in 1920 and documented in humans in 1988.
Swine flu can be transmitted between pigs, between people, between swine and poultry, and from people to pigs. It can not be transmitted via the cooked meat of inspected pork, and no evidence exists to show that pigs have caused the new strain to develop or multiply and spread in the human population.
Yet the new strain is a combination of swine flu, with avian flu and other flu variants. Its disproportionate impact on Mexico focused the spotlights on the country’s role in the planet’s growing number of industrial hog farming operations, known to be breeding grounds wherever they are for the spread of disease.
The world’s largest producer of hogs and leading U.S. pork packer, Smithfield Foods, announced that its Granjas Carroll subsidiary near Perote, Veracruz, Mexico, was free of the strain, according to testing done of its more than one-half million feedlot pigs and its nearly 1,000 employees there.
“Our joint ventures in Mexico routinely administer influenza virus vaccination to their swine herds and conduct routine testing,” said Smithfield CEO C. Larry Pope.
Nevertheless, the company pledged to continue monitoring and testing for viruses at the facility, in acknowledgement of the susceptibility to virus production created by confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs). One of the first confirmed cases from the new flu was a child from La Gloria, adjacent to Smithfield’s Mexico joint venture, where flu symptoms ran rampant throughout April.
The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) issued a statement that hogs need not be slaughtered to stem the disease, after Mexico sacrificed 900 pigs in the state of Guerrero and Egypt threatened to destroy its 300,000 head. The organization found that swine had been infected through contact with humans in Canada, but in any case the animals usually recovered quickly.
Following the outbreak, the FAO ordered teams of investigators to check Mexico’s feedlots. FAO Chief Veterinarian Joseph Domenech advised that the human-hog transmission possibility should be closely watched. “This was expected and FAO was already saying there was a need to do more pig surveillance,” he said.
Biosecurity measures such as quarantine of pigs at CAFOs might become necessary to prevent farm-to-farm spread of the disease where it is found, he added.
The FAO has been scrutinizing Mexico’s pig pens since as far back as 2000, when its experts launched a pork project in central Mexico to study the effects of CAFOs on the environment. This led to a carbon trading program that allowed Mexican businesses to profit on exchange of carbon credits the country receives based on reductions of methane greenhouse gas emissions obtained from covering the excrement ponds at the hog lots, under the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism.
With an expanding population of more than 17.5 million pigs in the feedlots back then, a research project sponsored by the Montreal-based trinational Commission for Environmental Cooperation of the North American Free Trade Agreement noted: “The proper handling of this large quantity of CAFO animal waste is critical to protecting human health and the environment.”
Smithfield’s Granjas Carroll is only one of dozens of major factory farms in states all around Mexico that is subject to examination. Sonora, Guanajuato, Nuevo Leon and Queretaro are among the big pig producing states. The production model is also prevalent nationwide in chicken and egg farming, as well as shrimp farming.
Mexico has been receiving carbon credits for the pig projects since 2006. Unlike Granjas Carroll, the CAFOs in the carbon trading equation have covered effluent ponds. By covering the lagoons, the original 14 carbon reduction projects registered in the country were expected to reduce annual methane emissions by the equivalent of 621,513 tons of carbon dioxide. At the same time, the method reduces volatile organic compounds, stench, and water pollution. It also provides a renewable energy source, methane biogas.
However, it does not resolve underlying problems with what critics have widely publicized as CAFOs’ health and environmental drawbacks. The mass-production style of raising meat creates global warming gases, other air pollutants and pathogens by using a water-based excrement handling method that results in anaerobic decomposition. By contrast, family farming or small-scale production units rely on dry composting and aerobic decomposition, in which the carbon is returned to the soil and sequestered for enrichment of crop production.
Organizations promoting alternatives to CAFO proliferation, such as the non-profit U.S. Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, note that animal welfare is at stake in CAFOs because the extremely close confinement typical of the facilities goes against natural instincts; prohibits exercise; encourages disease transmission; and weakens, hurts and crazes livestock. This in turn affects human welfare, because the pigs must be maintained with antibiotics and vaccinations, traces of which enter the consumers’ organisms, affect immune systems and are transmitted genetically.
Traditional production models that integrate hog farming into a diversified crop and livestock operation are the recommended alternative, they say.
Some six weeks after the new swine flu reared its ugly head, the worldwide statistics for its impact were staggering, not in terms of severity but in terms of contagiousness in humans. Nearly 30,000 confirmed cases had been reported from 74 countries. Officially, 6,241 of them were in Mexico, including 108 deaths – less than half as many cases as in the U.S., but with four times as many mortalities. “This is only part of the picture,” said WHO Director Margaret Chan, adding that the countries with less surveillance may be under reporting.
Indeed, it is only part of the picture, when the risks of CAFOs are factored in.
