swine flu
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Are we too clean?
Photo: pfly via FlickrDearests, with yesterday’s Clorox wipes letter on my mind, I was intrigued to read the following headline in today’s Wall Street Journal: Can Dirt Do a Little Good? The story talks about the new film Babies, a Focus feature following the first year of life for four babies living in Namibia, Mongolia, […]
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Roberts, take 1: Coal is in short supply, expensive, and cannot be made clean
This is the second entry in a series of six email exchanges between two climate-change experts on the future use of coal. The series was originally posted here. Editorial note: Roberts argues that the key question is not “how can we best reduce carbon dioxide emissions?” Rather, we need to confront a more fundamental question […]
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Uh-oh: Tamiflu-resistant swine flu rears up in the U.S., U.K.
In Meat Wagon, we round up the latest outrages from the meat and livestock industries. ——— Ever since evolution of the swine flu virus accelerated in 1998, virologists and veterinary-science have warned (PDF) that factory hog farms create the ideal conditions for generating novel viruses. They worried that three things would happen: That a novel […]
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Why the USDA has no business overseeing conditions on factory farms, and more
In Meat Wagon, we round up the latest outrages from the meat and livestock industries. —— USDA chief Tom Vilsack, with special friends: Will this guy ever get serious about the swine flu/swine farm link? Why isn’t the federal government seriously investigating the possible CAFO-swine flu link? I’ve posed that question several times recently, most […]
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Time for the mainstream media to face the factory farm-swine flu link
“Since last spring and the onset of the 2009 pandemic H1N1 influenza outbreak in humans, USDA has consistently asked that the media stop calling this “novel” pandemic virus “swine flu.” By continuing to mislabel the 2009 pandemic H1N1 influenza virus that is affecting human populations around the world, the media is causing undue and undeserved […]
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For swine flu, forget origins and start thinking about practices
How is a massive hog farms like an open box of oily rags stored near a furnace? Photo courtesy of USDA Natural Resources Conservation ServiceAmid a trickle of news and science about swine flu over the past week, I’ve been rethinking my position on the novel H1N1 virus that has now infected millions of Americans […]
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Six months after the outbreak, who’s investigating the CAFO-swine flu link?
Not hogging the H1N1 spotlight: A “state of the art” pig CAFO in Georgia.Photo courtesy of USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service.“When respiratory viruses get into these confinement facilities, they have continual opportunity to replicate, mutate, reassort, and recombine into novel strains … The best surrogates we can find in the human population are prisons, military […]
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From Whole (junk) Foods to Julia/Julie hype, tasty morsels from around the Web
When my info-larder gets too packed, it’s time to serve up some choice nuggets from around the Web. —————- • “Everything I’ve written is straw,” Thomas Aquinas is supposed to have lamented from his deathbed. Whole Foods CEO John Mackey seems to have come to a similar conclusion about the supermarket chain he founded decades […]
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North Carolina governor asked to address hog industry’s health impacts
Environmental advocates gathered at the North Carolina legislature yesterday for a press conference and prayer vigil asking the governor to create a task force to study and take action on health problems associated with industrial hog farms. The action came the same week new findings were published about the critical role hogs played in creating […]
