The Pigs of Carroll's Farms

Our good friend Kat sent me a link to an article that points out the origin of this nasty epidemic to the pigs of Carrol's Farms.

And I ain't talking about the hogs kept at the pens. I'm talking about the swines running the company.

Grist food editor Tom Philpott writes:

Is Smithfield Foods, the world’s largest pork packer and hog producer, linked to the outbreak? Smithfield operates massive hog-raising operations Perote, Mexico, in the state of Vera Cruz, where the outbreak originated. The operations, grouped under a Smithfield subsidiary called Granjas Carroll, raise 950,000 hogs per year, according to the company Web site.

This story, as Philpott points out, was already being mentioned on the Mexican media, by both a small Veracruz-based paper —La Marcha— as well as by La Jornada, a national newspaper of leftist orientation.

According to both papers, the citizens of the community La Gloria had been complaining to the local and federal authorities about the unhygienic conditions in which Carrol's disposed of their wastes, which polluted both the air and the waters. The locals told of foul smells coming from the oxidation pools that the company kept on open ground, and of clouds of flies that the pools created. So it would seem that the vector for the vius were either the waste waters that contaminated the ground reservoirs, or the flies hovering the pools —either alternative is terrifying, and there's been no talk in the media about how exactly the virus jumped from the pigs to humans; until now my guess was that the infection came from California or Texas (given the earliest CDC reports) possibly by a migrant worker that traveled to Veracrúz. So what is the truth?

These articles are from April 5th (Jornada) and April 15th (La Marcha).

The neighbors of La Gloria warned the authorities that the wastes of these pig breeding farms caused an outbreak of respiratory infections and pneumonia in 60% of their 3000 inhabitants.

According to La Jornada, by that time the local Congressman downsized the threat and even blamed the locals for spreading the disease, by not going to a clinic and opting to treat the sick with local remedies. Obviously, this pendejo(*) has never had the necessity to go to one of the clinics run by the state, where they hardly have medicines and people can wait many hours to see a doctor...

If you read my previous post, you'll find that the director of the Health Secretary did acknowledge that they sent people to the pig farming area of Veracruz, but in the article of La Marcha, you read that he dismissed the notion that Carrol's were contaminating the water supplies.

The locals have also informed that because of their complaints, they have been harrased by Carrol's employees. All I can say is... hijos de su pinche madre!! (*).

So things are beginning to clear up. As usual, when the poor are the only ones affected, the authorities are slow to response or they don't heed the warnings for fear of upsetting the multinational companies that inject money to the region. But now things have changed dramatically: now we're talking about a threat by both poor & rich, a threat that menaces not only the people of a small town in Mexico's undeveloped countryside, but that has the potential of disrupting the lives of every human being in this planet.

This outbreak is not a conspiracy-theory bio-weapon threat, as some suggest. This is merely the end result of our usual idiocy an short-sightedness, coming to bite us in the ass.

Will this be the wake-up call that forces us to start reversing our ways and force greedy companies to think in the long term instead of minding only about quaterly profits without giving a fuck about the repercussions of their actions?

Only time will tell... in the meantime, this is an election year in Mexico. Hopefully the people will think about using their vote to oust the incompetents that were to slow and/or stupid to impede this nightmare.

(*): Look for the translation at your own risk ;-)

PS: I admit that jumping to conclude that Carrol's was the origin of the outbreak is too premature. It is still possible that the infection first came up in California and from there it jumped to Mexico; all the medical experts answering the questions of the Mexican population have not said anything about the possibility that waters contaminated with pig feces or flies could become vectors for the flu; the fact remains though, that one case of H1N1 swine flu infection was confirmed in La Gloria by the Health Department.

Despite all this the activities of this pig breeding company must be thoroughly investigated. Even if they didn't cause the epidemic, they are still pigs who need to clean their pigsty.