Image: Piglets packed together in a Confined Animal Feeding Operation / Farm Sanctuary

Since my previous post on this topic, Priming the Pump of a Swine Flu Pandemic, there have been several analyses that lead credence to the argument that Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) have acted as an effective breeding ground and dispensary for new zoonotic pathogens (and potentially the H1N1 swine flu). By housing hundreds of thousands of immune-compromised animals under one roof, a new mutant virus could be quickly disseminated throughout the population and be more likely to transfer from animals to humans. Now, two respected scholars have issued their analysis on this question and their conclusions should be of concern for everyone who has seen the social and economic damage wrought in recent years through avian and swine flu pandemics.

Writing for the think tank Institute for Policy Studies, Stanford fellow John Feffer has written seven books on international relations and is the co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus. In his article “Capitalist Pigs” he suggests that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is chiefly responsible for allowing Smithfield to move their hog operations to Veracruz, Mexico following multiple health violations in the U.S.

Smithfield was polluting the Chesapeake Bay before it branched out into polluting Mexico. In 1997, Smithfield was hit with the largest water pollution fine ever — $12.7 million — for dumping you-know-what into a river that feeds into the Chesapeake. Thanks to the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Smithfield could easily shift operations to a place where health and safety regulations are considerably less strict. Rather than raising standards — wages, environmental regulations, health care — free trade agreements have pushed down the quality of life for workers and those living in communities around operations like Smithfield's in Veracruz.

Feffer cites several health professionals who have been concerned about the potential that such lax regulation could have for the public welfare:

Pigs actually serve as a wonderful mixing vessel for influenza viruses to reassort," the CDC's Nancy Cox told The Washington Post. Epidemiologist Ellen Silbergeld was even more to the point: "It's my opinion that these kinds of events go on all the time because we have so little regulation of industrial agriculture. It's appropriate to refer to these animal operations as viral mixing bowls".

However, in a similar way that troop movements in 1918 allowed for the spread of the “Spanish flu” (where it likely was given to pigs, and has been living with them ever since) so too does modern technology allow for the rapid movement of new diseases.

These days, pathogens are benefiting from the greater circulation of people, goods, and capital. Both AIDS and SARS were given a big boost by airline travel. But the creation of a global assembly line for food production — swine flu breeding grounds, avian flu Petri dishes, mad cow disease production facilities — has exponentially increased our chances of breeding a virus that can tear through our compromised global immune system.

In similar fashion, University of Minnesota researcher Robert Wallace, whose new book Farming Human Pathogens will be available in July through Springer Academic Press, has dubbed the H1N1 virus pandemic “The NAFTA Flu.” This complicated assortment of avian, swine and human viruses has benefitted through human decisions of animal production and transport:

Although considerable attention is being paid to the role of a particular company in the emergence of the new influenza, and rightfully so, we might better focus on the deregulation that allowed such porcinopolises to grow to the point that whole human communities are pushed off the land pigs now occupy.

So if we are to impart responsibility where it should lay, North America’s new influenza would be better called the NAFTA flu. The North American Free Trade Agreement, pushed by Bill Clinton in 1993 and approved by a bipartisan Congress, reduced trade barriers across the U.S., Canada and Mexico. Products could now be marketed across the three countries without levies that favored domestic industries. The agreement also allowed companies to purchase and consolidate businesses in other member countries. Granjas Carroll, the Veracruz-based company under present scrutiny for the present outbreak, is a subsidiary of U.S.-based Smithfield Foods.

Wallace also suggests that CAFOs may have been responsible for generating a more virulent strain of the original swine flu under factory farm conditions.

Simply put, to start, there is a cap on pathogen virulence. Pathogens must avoid evolving the capacity to incur such damage to their hosts that they are unable to transmit themselves. If a pathogen kills its host before it infects the next host it destroys its own chain of transmission. But what happens when the pathogen ‘knows’ that the next host is coming along much sooner? The pathogen can get away with being virulent because it can successfully infect the next susceptible in the chain before it kills its host. The faster the transmission rate, the lower the cost of virulence.

That’s the mechanism in the abstract. What of specifics? What objects or processes are responsible for increasing transmission rates in such a way as to ramp up a variety of influenzas to breathtaking virulence? Growing circumstantial evidence points to intensive livestock production or, in the more critical lexicon, factory farming.

Wallace links to a several studies, and I encourage interested parties to take a look.

- Capua I and Alexander DJ (2004) Avian influenza: Recent Developments. Avian Pathology 33(4):393-404

- Otte J, Roland-Holst D, Soares-Magalheas R, Rushton J, Graham J, Silbergeld E (2007) Industrial Livestock Production and Global Health Risks. Pro-Poor Livestock Policy Initiative Research Report, RR Nr 07-09

- Hahn WF, Haley M, Leuck D, Miller JJ, Perry J, Taha F, Zahniser S (2005). Market Integration of the North American Animal Products Complex. United States Department of Agriculture, LDP-M-131-01.

The suggestion that factory farm CAFOs are responsible for the current pandemic remains an untested hypothesis at this point. Smithfield has promised they are conducting genetic tests of the pigs at Granjas Carroll to determine if they were the source (results which they have once again delayed in reporting). We may never know with 100% certainty whether factory farms have promoted the rise of this and similar pandemics, but the circumstantial evidence is certainly persuasive and worthy of further attention.

For recent interviews on this topic see the John Hopkins epidemiologist Ellen Silbergeld on PRI’s The World and UM’s Robert Wallace on the daily television news program Democracy Now.