Going to the Source

Here is an interesting tidbit about the origin of the current outbreak of swine flu, aka H1N1 virus, aka influenza A, and soon to be aka "that non-event event".

This Wired article by Brandon Keim indicts modern industrial scale agriculture practices:

Scientists have traced the genetic lineage of the new H1N1 swine flu to a strain that emerged in 1998 in U.S. factory farms, where it spread and mutated at an alarming rate. Experts warned then that a pocket of the virus would someday evolve to infect humans, perhaps setting off a global pandemic.

The new findings challenge recent protests by pork industry leaders and U.S., Mexican and United Nations agriculture officials that industrial farms shouldn’t be implicated in the new swine flu, which has killed up to 176 people and on Thursday was declared an imminent pandemic by the World Health Organization.

“Industrial farms are super-incubators for viruses,” said Bob Martin, former executive director of the Pew Commission on Industrial Animal Farm Production, and a long-time critic of the so-called “contained animal feeding operations.”

This sounds credible to me. Of course the crazies will immediately call for society to go back to 18th century farming and animal husbandry practices. That of course will mean that humans instead of the flu will have to kill off 5 in 6 living people so that we can be "sustained" by Mother Earth.

Being the simple-minded pragmatist that I am, the simpler path forward is to impose some regulations (you know "rules" and messy heavy-handed bureaucratic fiddling that gets in the way of wild-eyed me-first entrepreneurs). Simple monitoring and containment regulations would probably do the trick. That that story isn't as "sexy" as demands to eliminate these large scale operations and calls to return to the golden age of Mom & Pop farms.