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swine flu

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    Do dirty coal plants make us more vulnerable to swine flu?

    Scientists have discovered that exposure to a common pollutant may make people more likely to experience severe symptoms from swine flu — and it’s a pollutant emitted in large quantities by coal-burning power plants and other industrial facilities. The culprit is arsenic, a highly poisonous semi-metal which, according to a new study by researchers at […]

    Sue Sturgis Climate & Energy

  • Europeans demand investigation of the CAFO/swine flu link

    Swine flu continues Maroon lagoon: Take a dip in a hog-waste cesspool? spreading across the globe, killing people–even (gasp) Americans. (Eleven have died in New York City alone.) Ho-hum. As I predicted a few weeks ago, the flu scare has skulked off the front pages and into the realms of historical amnesia, that vast American […]

    Tom Philpott Food

  • Biotech industry group alights on La Gloria to test backyard pigs

    Hogs in a CAFO. The good news is that bloggers and other hysterics aren’t the only ones taking seriously La Gloria, Mexico, as the possible origin of the swine flu pandemic. From an extremely interesting AP article: Scientists are returning next week to La Gloria, a pig-farming village in the Veracruz mountains where Mexico’s earliest […]

    Tom Philpott Food

  • Another symptom of swine flu: instant amnesia

    Photo illustration by Tom Twigg / Grist Swine flu: how very two weeks ago. Sure, H1N1 transmission is “still on the upswing” in the United States, and the World Health Organization warned that as much of a third of the globe’s population could eventually catch it, Reuters reported last week. But the disease is turning […]

    Tom Philpott Food

  • Uncomfortable facts about the swine flu outbreak

    You’re testing my patienceDon’t associate U.S. pork with the swine flu outbreak — you can’t catch it through pork. Plus, no pigs on U.S. CAFOs are infected with it. That’s message the industry and the USDA are straining  to get across, anyway. Except … you can catch swine flu from pork, according to the World […]

    Tom Philpott Food

  • Smithfield: don’t worry, we’re testing our Mexican hogs for swine flu

    For a lobbyist working the Hill on behalf of an industry, the gold standard is self-regulation. No need to send in inspectors — we’ll test our process to ensure that it doesn’t pollute. Trust us! Astonishingly, pork giant Smithfield Foods has evidently managed to arrange just such a testing regime with regard to its hog-rearing […]

    Tom Philpott Food

  • Now is not the time for timidity

    I agree with the calls for some amount of caution in the search for a smoking gun in the swine flu pandemic. There’s always the danger of over-reaching and turning your target into an object of sympathy. But really, the science IS behind us on this one. The head virologist of the CDC has indeed […]

    Tom Laskawy Food

  • Jumping to conclusions in health matters may have adverse side effects

    The past week, the Netiverse has erupted with stories linking the Granjas Carroll confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs) near La Gloria, Vera Cruz, Mexico, with the outbreak of a strain of H1N1 influenza, commonly called “swine flu,” that has triggered concerns about possible flu pandemic reminiscent of the one that claimed tens of millions of […]

    David M. Lawrence Food

  • CDC: swine flu strain has genetic roots in U.S.A.

    (Another hat tip to the increasingly essential Tom Laskawy.) In an interview with Science Magazine,  CDC chief virologist Ruben Donis essentially confirmed the reading of the current swine flu strain made by New Scientist: that it evolved from a strain that cropped up in U.S. hog farms in 1998. Both New Scientist and Donis emphasize […]

    Tom Philpott Food