today's mess of swine flu links

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Moved up from 11:00am PDT... and up again from 3:45.
This will help make my point about the sanitation problems of monster pig farms, Smithfield's in particular, and how much nicer it has to be for the company to do it where there aren't so many people bitching at them for their practices. It will be coming even clearer why there would be no mention of this probable Ground Zero for this potential pandemic, and why Mexican doctors are afraid to publicize the real number of deaths from it.

Old Uncle Dave's friend's relative was afraid to go public, but wanted to warn his family, and we found evidence that he, or someone, made the report of 200 deaths to the people who are tracking at Veratect, which strengthens the case that there really are more deaths than are being reported by the authorities. Plus, Dave's friend won't go to the media either because he fears for his relative in Mexico. Why would these guys be afraid of coming forward when their information could save lives? Yes, it might also panic people, but how many more people would be washing their hands, stores disinfecting their isles, stores having their stocks of ham tested, hospitals and doctors quicker to take measures if these facts were put into evidence?

Watch this space. All flu-related links for today are going to go here.

Grist weighs in on the point of origin and the disease vector... but I think that 30% is low. I think the stuff at Biosurveillance said 60% of the local population.

You, like, so don't want to be dealing with Tamiflu....

No shit, Dr. Guan....

Okay, it's time to bring up the special problem we have here in California with our public schools. As Agent BB2 has just pointed out, we now have a confirmed case in a Sacramento 7th-grader. I have a dear friend who is a second grade teacher down in Fort Bragg. There is always strife between schools in Mendocino and Fort Bragg because the Mendocino schools get such radically better testing results than do the ones in Fort Bragg. The two towns are about eight miles apart. Whut could be the prob? The problem is that Mendocino is too expensive for immigrant families, even if they gang up ten families to one cottage. So they all live in Fort Bragg which is much more affordable, though still expensive. Most of the second-graders, even if they were born here, do not know how to speak English. Teaching them is much harder because of this. Not only does this problem exist, but there are so many Hispanic students in Fort Bragg schools that they have had to lengthen Christmas and Easter vacations and shorten summer vacation because so many kids go with their parents back to Mexico for these holidays. The schools get paid on the basis of days attended per student per school year, so this was the only way to keep the attendance up enough to cover the nut. I know this problem holds with all elementary schools in the Central Valley and the coastal regions of California. I am at the very top of the state and there are far more immigrants living here than citizens because we have huge Easter Lily farms, huge dairies and Pelican Bay Prison very nearby. They're either here for the farm work or here to be near their fathers and brothers and sons in prison, waiting for their release. So beside the obvious problem of tourists returning from trips to Mexico, there is the less obvious problem of mobs of Catholics who go at Easter to be with their families in Mexico returning to their jobs here.

So the CDC and WHO disinclination to be alarmist, and the rest of our government's disinclination to affix blame to a megalithic corporate food giant seem to account completely for why something that could have been contained much more effectively seems not to have been contained at all.

Not taking into account packaging; not taking into account the lack of connection with Mexico of some cases.

Wikipedia weighs in and I would like to stress that the companies whose pig farm is the suspected genesis of this outbreak also raise turkeys and boast of a profit edge through some strange manipulation of feed regimen which costs less than other producers must spend to put out the same product. I wasn't reading carefully about what that was... but... you know, I have this imagination....

Ooooo, I love how they just go right ahead and call global warming overpopulation-caused... but it was nice of them to acknowledge just how strange a brew this "swine" flu really is.

WHO raises threat to level 4....

Looks as though a real journalist has landed something on a groupthink page:

According to an April 5 article in La Jornada newspaper, "Clouds of flies emanate from the lagoons where Granjas Carroll discharges the fecal waste from its hog barns - as well as air pollution that has already caused an epidemic of respiratory infections in the town."

More than 400 people had already been treated for respiratory infections, and more than 60 percent of the town's 3,000 residents had reported getting sick, the paper said. State officials disputed that claim, and said the illnesses were caused by cold weather and dust in the air.

The problems began in early March, when many neighbors of the hog CAFO (confined animal feeding operation) became sick with colds and flu that quickly turned into lung infections, causing local health officials to impose a "sanitary cordon" around the area and begin a mass program of vaccination and home fumigation.

"According to state agents of the Mexican Social Security Institute, the vector of this outbreak are the clouds of flies that come out of the hog barns, and the waste lagoons into which the Mexican-US company spews tons of excrement," La Jornada reported. "Even so, state and federal authorities paid no attention to the residents, until today."

Some might call this as well, since they probably couldn't pay for them anyway, but I think it's smart, giving how hard I suspect they're downplaying the genesis and the body count and the threat level... all of which being either transcendentally stupid or perfidy itself.

And I'm feeling kind of queazy about the advisability of growing vaccine in chicken eggs, since it's got an avian flu component:

While on-the-ground investigators and leading laboratories around the world are trying to figure out what sort of virus the H1N1 is, others are trying to assess humans' defenses against it.

The latest news isn't good. Tests at the CDC suggest that the flu shots many Americans and Europeans got this season probably don't offer protection against the new swine flu virus.

There had been hope that the current seasonal vaccine might do some good, since it contains an H1N1 virus component - meaning the new swine flu strain was at least in the same family of viruses. But the new H1N1 virus is apparently too different for the current vaccine to offer what scientists call "cross protection."

This has big implications: It means scientists and vaccine makers have to gear up as fast as they can to make a new vaccine that specifically protects against the new swine flu virus. But mass production of flu vaccine, which is grown inside chicken eggs, typically takes around six months.

"There are discussions that are ongoing about the decision to make a vaccine and whether that should be undertaken, but it's not an easy decision," says Besser of the CDC. "Those discussions are under way so that if we decide to manufacture a vaccine, we'd be ready to start that process."

I mean, somehow, that just doesn't sound kosher to me.

You read a little way into this and you get an idea how ludicrous the company's protestations of humans not getting it from pigs or pork really are.

No. Solis did die with flu-like symptoms the day after showing Obama around.

Well, and they'd be extra quiet about the source of this potential pandemic because they are right in the middle of trying to sell the whole poke full of pigs to China!

Okay, I seem to have fallen down one of those bottomless wells again and am reeling from all the bickering going on. Here is a post trying to refute Philpott's [and my] thesis, but not succeeding... though I think I love the site and probably the author too. I feel compelled to mention that this El Dragón person doesn't seem to grok just how much pressure there would be not to involve such big corporations in this, even if they caused it, and especially not when they are trying to sell themselves to China to get their hands on real money. People in the comments sections at Grist and Fair Food Fight don't seem to grok that the company and the authorities would almost certainly LIE about these swine being healthy, when they are riddled with disease. I don't grok why these things seem difficult for any of them to fathom!

You've got sick pigs on a huge and tightly populated corporate farm, and their vital fluids are getting all over the workers slaughtering them, and butchering them, and packing them, plus the swarms of flies being born in the dung and entrails getting their flu-laden feet all over the packaging materials, and it's going to sicken and kill many locals and people who have been celebrating Easter with the locals, and travelers who have come in contact with the people who celebrated Easter with the locals, and the virus all over the packaging is going everywhere in the world with the finished product from the factory farm. The people closest to the outbreak are going to come in contact with tons more of the virus and it's going to be less the further you get from it. This makes too much sense, and the reasons the authorities wouldn't be mentioning it make too much of the macabre sense we have had to grow used to over the past couple decades. So I just don't get why these guys are squabbling. They're both, clearly, on the side of a green, sustainable, clean, healthy, non-fascist-infested future... and how can you be that if you can't grok that the fascist fucks will lie and murder before they will forego profit? How can you be that if you don't grok that our government is RUN by precisely these fascist profiteer murderating fucks?

Pfeh.

Pfeh. A denial? The local governor puts out a denial? What a shock.

They got to him.

Don't you even try accusing me of cynicism.

Ha! They're finally admitting that the fatality rate is actually higher than reported so far.

Caseload in New Zealand starting to explode....

And New York....