From the May 2009 Idaho Observer:


Flying pigs, factory farming and Tamiflu

The swine flu is not going away. The pandemic preparedness machinery is in motion and it appears that the CDC, et al, have decided that the next influenza pandemic for which it has been planning since the 1976 swine flu fiasco is here. The general response among people is fear of an alleged microorganism capable of mutating into an extremely virulent and lethal superbug. But the problem is not now, nor has it ever been the "germ." The problem is the terrain—sick bodies and sick factory farming practices.

By F. William Engdahl

If we are to believe what our trusted international media report, the world is on the brink of a global pandemic outbreak of a new deadly strain of flu, H1N1 as it has been labelled, or more popularly, Swine Flu. As the story goes, the outbreak of the deadly flu was first discovered in Mexico. According to press reports announcing the outbreak, as many as 150 deaths in Mexico were believed caused by this virulent people-killing pig virus that has spread to humans and now is allegedly being further spread from human to human. Cases were being reported hourly from Canada to Spain and beyond. The only thing wrong with this story is that it is largely based on lies, hype and coverup of possible real causes of Mexican deaths.

One website, revealingly named Swine Flu Vaccine, reports the alarming news, "One out of every five residents of Mexico’s most populous city wore masks to protect themselves against the virus as Mexico City seems to be the epicenter of the outbreak. As many as 103 deaths have been attributed to the swine flu so far with many more feared to be on the horizon. The health department of Mexico said an additional 1,614 reported cases have been documented."

We are told that the H1N1 "shares genetic material from human, avian and swine influenza viruses."1

Airports around the world have installed passenger temperature scans to identify travelers with above normal body temperatures as possible suspects for swine flu. Travel to Mexico collapsed. Sales of flu vaccines, above all Tamiflu from Roche Inc., have exploded. People have stopped buying pork fearing certain death. The World Health Organization declared "a public health emergency of international concern," defined by them as "an occurrence or imminent threat of illness or health conditions caused by bioterrorism, epidemic or pandemic disease, or highly fatal infectious agents or toxins that pose serious risk to a significant number of people."2

What are the symptoms of this purported swine flu? That’s not at all clear according to virologists and public health experts. They say swine flu symptoms are relatively general and nonspecific. "So many different things can cause these symptoms. It is a dilemma," says one doctor interviewed by CNN. "There is not a perfect test right now to let a doctor know that a person has the swine flu."

It has been noted that most individuals with swine flu had an early onset of fever. Also it was common to see dizziness, body aches and vomiting in addition to the common sneezing, headache and other cold symptoms. These are symptoms so general as to say nothing.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta states on its official website, "Swine Influenza (swine flu) is a respiratory disease of pigs caused by type A influenza viruses that cause regular outbreaks in pigs. People do not normally get swine flu, but human infections can and do happen. Swine flu viruses have been reported to spread from person-to-person, but in the past, this transmission was limited and not sustained beyond three people."

Regardless of the foregoing, the CDC then states it "...has determined that this swine influenza A (H1N1) virus is contagious and is spreading from human to human. However, at this time, it is not known how easily the virus spreads between people."3

How many media that have grabbed on the headline "suspected case of swine flu" in recent weeks bother to double check with the local health authorities to ask some basic questions? For example, the number of confirmed cases of H1N1 and their location? The number of deaths confirmed to have resulted from H1N1? Dates of both? Number of suspected cases and of suspected deaths related to the swine flu disease?

Conditions at ground zero

According to Biosurveillance, itself part of Veratect, a U.S. Pentagon and government-linked epidemic reporting center, on April 6, 2009, local health officials declared a health alert due to a respiratory disease outbreak in La Gloria, Perote Municipality, Veracruz State, Mexico. "Sources characterized the event as a ‘strange’ outbreak of acute respiratory infection, which led to bronchial pneumonia in some pediatric cases. According to a local resident, symptoms included fever, severe cough and large amounts of phlegm. Health officials recorded 400 cases that sought medical treatment in the last week in La Gloria, which has a population of 3,000; officials indicated that 60% of the town’s population (approximately 1,800 cases) has been affected. No precise timeframe was provided, but sources reported that a local official had been seeking health assistance for the town since February."

What they later say is "strange" is not the form of the illness but the time of year as most flu cases occur in Mexico during the period of October to February.

The report went on to note, "Residents claimed that three pediatric cases, all under two years of age, died from the outbreak. However, health officials stated that there was no direct link between the pediatric deaths and the outbreak; they stated the three fatal cases were ‘isolated’ and ‘not related’ to each other."

Factory pig farming

Then, most revealingly, the aspect of the story which has been largely ignored by major media, the same report noted, "Residents believed the outbreak had been caused by contamination from pig breeding farms located in the area. They believed that the farms, operated by Granjas Carroll, polluted the atmosphere and local water bodies, which in turn led to the disease outbreak. According to residents, the company denied responsibility for the outbreak and attributed the cases to ‘flu.’ However, a municipal health official stated that preliminary investigations indicated that the disease vector was a type of fly that reproduces in pig waste and that the outbreak was linked to the pig farms."4

Since the dawn of American "agribusiness," a project initiated with funding by the Rockefeller Foundation in the 1950s to turn farming into a pure profit maximization business, U.S. pig or hog production has been transformed into a highly efficient, mass production industrialized enterprise from birth to slaughter. Pigs are caged in what are called "factory farms," industrial concentrations which are run with the efficiency of a Dachau or Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. The pigs are conceived by artificial insemination and, once born, are regularly injected with antibiotics, not because of illnesses which abound in the hyper-crowded growing pens, but in order to make them grow and add weight faster. Turn around time to slaughter is a profit factor of highest priority. The entire operation is vertically integrated from conception to slaughter to transport distribution to supermarket.

A lot of pigs

Granjas Carroll de Mexico (GCM) happens to be such a factory farm concentration facility for hogs. In 2008 it produced almost one million factory hogs; 950,000 according to their own statistics. GCM is a joint venture operation owned 50 percent by the world’s largest pig producing industrial company, Smithfield Foods of Virginia.5 The pigs are grown in a tiny rural area of Mexico, a member of the North American Free Trade Agreement, and primarily trucked across the border to supermarkets in the USA, under the Smithfield family of labels. Most American consumers have no idea where the meat was raised.

Manure lagoons and other playing fields

The Times of London interviewed the mother of 4-year-old Edgar Hernandez of La Gloria in Veracruz, the location of the giant Smithfield Foods hog production facility. Their local reporter noted, "Edgar Hernández plays among the dogs and goats that roam through the streets, seemingly unaware that the swine flu he contracted a few weeks ago—the first known case—has almost brought his country to a standstill and put the rest of the world on alert. ‘I feel great,’ the five-year-old boy said. ‘But I had a headache and a sore throat and a fever for a while. I had to lay down in bed.’’’

The reporters added, "It was confirmed on Monday [April 27, 2009] that Edgar was the first known sufferer of swine flu, a revelation that has put La Gloria and its surrounding factory pig farms and ‘manure lagoons’ at the centre of a global race to find how this new and deadly strain of swine flu emerged."6

That’s quite interesting. They speak of "La Gloria and its surrounding factory pig farms" and "manure lagoons.’’ Presumably the manure lagoons around the LaGloria factory pig farm of Smithfield Foods are the waste dumping place for the feces and urine waste from at least 950,000 pigs a year that pass through the facility. The Smithfield’s Mexico joint venture, Norson, states that alone they slaughter 2,300 pigs daily. That’s a lot of pigs and it gives us an idea of the volumes of pig waste involved in the concentration facility at La Gloria.

Significantly, according to the Times reporters, "residents of La Gloria have been complaining since March that the odour from Granjas Carroll’s pig waste was causing severe respiratory infections. They held a demonstration this month at which they carried signs of pigs crossed with an X and marked with the word peligro (danger)."7

There have been calls to exhume the bodies of the children who died of pneumonia so that they could be tested. The state legislature of Veracruz has demanded that Smithfield’s Granjas Carroll release documents about its waste-handling practices. Smithfield Foods reportedly declined to comment on the request, saying that it would "not respond to rumours."8

A research compilation by Ed Harris reported, "According to residents, the company denied responsibility for the outbreak and attributed the cases to ‘flu.’ However, a municipal health official stated that preliminary investigations indicated that the disease vector was a type of fly that reproduces in pig waste and that the outbreak was linked to the pig farms."9

That would imply that the entire swine flu scare might have originated from the PR spin doctors of the world’s largest industrial pig factory farm operation, Smithfield Foods.

The Vera Cruz-based newspaper La Marcha blames Smithfield’s GCM for the outbreak, highlighting inadequate treatment of massive quantities of animal waste from hog production.10

Understandably the company is perhaps more than a bit uncomfortable with the sudden attention. In 1997, parent company Smithfield, which supplies the McDonald’s and Subway fast-food chains, was fined $12.3 million in the U.S. for violating the Clean Water Act. Perhaps Smithfield moved its operations to a remote tiny Mexican rural area to enjoy a relatively lax regulatory climate where they need not worry about being cited for violations of any Clean Water Act.

Factory farms as toxic concentrations

At the very least the driving force for giant industrial agribusiness outsourcing of facilities to third world sites such as Veracruz, Mexico has more to do with further cost reduction and lack of health and safety scrutiny than it does with improving the health and safety quality of the food end product. It has been widely documented—and the subject of U.S. Congressional reports—that large-scale indoor animal production facilities such as that of Granjas Carroll are notorious breeding grounds for toxic pathogens.

A recent report by the U.S. Pew Foundation, in cooperation with the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, stated that, "the method of producing food animals in the United States has changed from the extensive system of small and medium-sized farms owned by a single family to a system of large, intensive operations where the animals are housed in large numbers in enclosed structures that resemble industrial buildings more than they do a traditional barn. That change has happened primarily out of view of consumers but has come at a cost to the environment and a negative impact on public health, rural communities, and the health and well-being of the animals themselves." 11

The Pew study notes, "The diversified, independent, family-owned farms of 40 years ago that produced a variety of crops and a few animals are disappearing as an economic entity, replaced by much larger, and often highly leveraged, farm factories. The animals that many of these farms produce are owned by the meat packing companies from the time they are born or hatched right through their arrival at the processing plant and from there to market."12

The study emphasizes that application of "untreated animal waste on cropland can contribute to excessive nutrient loading, contaminate surface waters, and stimulate bacteria and algal growth and subsequent reductions in dissolved oxygen concentrations in surface waters."13

That is where the real investigation ought to begin, with the health and sanitary dangers of the industrial factory pig farms like the one at Perote in Veracruz. The media spread of panic-mongering reports of every person in the world who happens to contract "symptoms" which vaguely resemble flu or even swine flu and the statements to date of authorities such as WHO or CDC are far from conducive to a rational scientific investigation.

Tamiflu and Rummy

In October, 2005, the Pentagon ordered vaccination of all U.S. military personnel worldwide against what it called Avian Flu, H5N1. Scare stories filled world media. Then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced he had budgeted more than $1 billion to stockpile the antiviral agent Oseltamivir sold under the name "Tamiflu." President Bush called on Congress to appropriate another $2 billion for Tamiflu stocks.

What Rumsfeld neglected to report at the time was a colossal conflict of interest. Prior to coming to Washington in January, 2001, Rumsfeld had been chairman of a California pharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences. Gilead Sciences held exclusive world patent rights to Tamiflu, a drug it had developed and whose world marketing rights were sold to the Swiss pharma giant, Roche. Rumsfeld was reportedly the largest stockholder in Gilead which got 10 percent of every Tamiflu dose Roche sold. 14 When it leaked out, the Pentagon issued a curt statement to the effect that Secretary Rumsfeld had decided not to sell but to retain his stock in Gilead, claiming that to sell would have indicated that he had "something to hide."

That agonizing decision not to sell was worth $millions as the Gilead share price soared more than 700 percent within weeks. Tamiflu is no mild candy to be taken lightly. It has heavy adverse effects. It contains matter that could have potentially deadly consequences for a person’s breathing and often reportedly leads to nausea, dizziness and other flu-like symptoms. Other adverse affects include "suicidal ideations."

Avian flu redux?

Since the outbreak of swine flu "panic" sales of Tamiflu and other "flu remedies" on the market have exploded. Wall Street firms have rushed to issue "buy" recommendations for Gilead.

Panic and fear of death was used by the Bush administration skillfully to promote the Avian Flu fraud. With ominous echoes of the current swine flu scare, avian flu was traced back to huge chicken factory farms in Thailand and other parts of Asia whose products were shipped across the world. Instead of a serious investigation into the sanitary conditions of those chicken factory farms, the Bush administration and WHO blamed "free-roaming chickens" from small family farms, a move that had devastating economic consequences to the farmers whose chickens were being raised in the most sanitary and natural conditions. Tyson Foods of Arkansas and CG Group of Thailand reportedly smiled all the way to the bank over that one.

F. William Engdahl is the author of the critically-acclaimed books "A Century of War" and "Seeds of Destruction." His new book, "Full Spectrum Dominance" is scheduled for release later this month (see ad page 4).

Note: References for this article are available in the online version posted to www.globalresearch.ca