While sitting in traffic on I-66, I heard Don Imus interview Huffington Post blogger David Kirby. In the brief few minutes Imus was not talking about his own illness, Kirby said that he reported the North American flu outbreak had been traced to the case of a four-year-old boy who lived close to a massive Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO) near his hometown, La Gloria, Mexico.
I immediately blurted out, “I would not be surprised if Smithfield owned the pig factory.” Natural Resources News Service (NRNS) has been investigating Smithfield and its political friends in Virginia since the 1990s. Smithfield, Virginia, is the Virginia ham capital. When covering the State of Virginia, NRNS reporter Suzanne Clarke discovered that the state during that period had one of the least effective and most politically charged state environmental protection agencies in the country.
Smithfield is a politically protected company. Even though its activities had a history of polluting Virginia waterways, the Department of Environmental Protection took little or no action against them. Despite its current New York corporate address, it is by any standard run like an old-South company: one not willingly to bow to government oversight or regulation. Its management understandably does not like reporters or anyone else snooping around its business practices.
Press accounts confirmed Smithfield’s ownership of the pig factory farm. The Times Online quoted Smithfield spokeswoman Keira Ullrich as saying, “… the company had found no clinical signs or symptoms of the presence of swine influenza in its swine herd or its employees working at its joint ventures anywhere in Mexico.”
A million animals a year are raised at Granjas Carroll de Mexico. Mexican environmental authorities report that local citizens of La Gloria have repeatedly complained about odors and flies from the massive “manure lagoons,” the accepted method of storing a byproduct of these CAFO mega-farms. Mexican and World Health Organization officials focused on this CAFO facility because of an outbreak of respiratory illness that began in the surrounding community last February. Mexican health officials have sealed off La Gloria and have tried to kill the flies coming from the pig-feces lagoons that they believe may be spreading disease.
James Wilson, a founding member of the Biosurveillance Indication and Warning Analysis Community (BIWAC), reported on his website that about 60 per cent of La Gloria’s population of 3,000 have sought medical assistance since February.
“Residents claimed that three pediatric cases, all under two years of age, died from the outbreak,” Wilson wrote. “However, officials stated that there was no direct link between the pediatric deaths and the outbreak; they said the three fatal cases were isolated and not related to each other.”
Mexico’s Health Minister Jose Angel Cordova made public yesterday the case of the Mexican boy. “We are at the most critical moment of the epidemic,” he said. “The number of cases will keep rising so we have to reinforce preventive measures.” He said that there have been no new cases detected in La Gloria, but epidemiologists want to examine the pigs in Mexico as a potential source of the outbreak.
I called Smithfield’s department of external affairs in hopes they had a corporate crisis communication plan ready for action. Clearly, they did not.
“We are not commenting,” the efficient executive assistant said.
According to the Times Online, a local Mexico association for factory farm owners, Mexico’s National Organization of Pig Production and Producers, released a statement, saying: “We deny completely that the influenza virus affecting Mexico originated in pigs because it has been scientifically demonstrated that this is not possible.”
The confirmation that Smithfield did indeed own part of the Granjas Carroll de Mexico farm is not good news for the company. But perhaps it will finally focus attention on the hell-on-earth in Mexico and the United States that these hog factories are and how they have been allowed to proliferate. If so, something good will come from the fact that a pig factory is suspected of being ground zero for what some health authorities fear is about to become a worldwide flu pandemic.
CAFOs are about as close to an abomination of nature as man has attempted for profit. They are horrible for the animals and worse for the surrounding communities that are poorly served by politicians who are charged with protecting them. Imagine giant lagoons of pig urine and feces fermenting in the hot Mexican sun and you have a pretty good idea of how air, water, and public health are compromised on a grand scale. Imagine politicians who allow sites to be turned into factory farms. Don’t blame Mexico. These CAFO facilities are everywhere in the United States now. Think about that next time you consider buying a retirement home on a golf course in Florida or South Carolina. Thanks to easily manipulated politicians, you may be moving right next to a CAFO.
Air pollution from these sites is an enormous problem. The feces dries in the hot sun and the winds blow the dust into the lungs of local residents. It does not distinguish between adults and children. Water pollution from leaking and overflowing pig feces lagoons is another problem.
Is it worth compromising health for cheap pork? Apparently, because Americans are so passive, most are ignoring the problem. In some ways we are not unlike the poor little pigs passively waiting for their corporate fate: slaughter.
Josh Reichert at the Pew Charitable Trusts is an activist trying to expose the CAFO problem. Sadly, his considerable efforts have not resulted in significant media attention. Outside the occasional stories on the novelty of the feces lagoons or the “shit cannons” used to empty them, the media has not covered the issue. Maybe now that a factory has been cited as a possible explanation for the pandemic, the cable-news types will direct their short attention spans to this huge public health menace.
But probably not. New video in from You Tube: a bull running through a supermarket, back to the Pandemic, after American Idol results and then there is Susan Boyle …
