Absolutely nothing is the official line from the American pork lobby. They even got the recent ‘Swine Flu’ renamed H1N1 in the popular press to re-iterate the lack of linkage. To their credit, their underlying claim is very accurate. You aren’t going to get the flu from eating pork products.
What their efforts miss, and what the Egyptian government (which is still dealing with avian flu) correctly understands, is that our annual battle with the flu comes directly from farmers interacting with pigs.
Pigs are incredible animals that, almost like magic, can simultaneously catch human, swine, and avian influenza. When they catch multiple strains at the same time, the different strains mix, creating a brand new influenza strain. That’s why scientists like to refer to pigs as ‘mixing vessels’ for influenza (other papers on the topic here, and here). That is also why the flu is constantly mutating, needing a new vaccine every year. Pigs keep on mixing the human strain with pieces of the Swine and Avian varieties. As long as farmers interact with pigs (and catch the flu from them) we will continue to see new types of flu emerge every year like clockwork. That is also why flus tend to start in China, where Farmers, Pigs, and Ducks live in close proximity.
2 responses so far ↓
1 rich // May 5, 2009 at 7:45 pm
Since much more of flu epidemics come from poultry farmers, should we disallow that as well?
2 Aziz Gilani // May 5, 2009 at 10:03 pm
Its the rapid mutation that pigs facilitate of easily spread flu that make them so darn problematic. Humans, birds and pigs all catch and transmit flu, but only pigs can combine and radically alter those flus. Its that rapid alteration that makes vaccination so difficult. The pig-mutated flu’s kill hundreds of thousands of people every year.
Although poultry can infect humans, humans rarely infect other humans with that strain of flu.
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