The Mexican swine flu, a genetic chimera probably conceived in the faecal mire of an industrial pigsty, suddenly threatens to give the whole world a fever. The initial outbreaks across North America reveal an infection already travelling at higher velocity than did the last official pandemic strain, the 1968 Hong Kong flu.

Stealing the limelight from our officially appointed assassin, H5N1, this porcine virus is a threat of unknown magnitude. It seems less lethal than Sars in 2003, but as an influenza it may be more durable than Sars. Given that domesticated seasonal type-A influenzas kill as many one million people a year, even a modest increment of virulence, especially if combined with high incidence, could produce carnage equivalent to a major war.

Meanwhile, one of its first victims has been the consoling faith, long preached by the World Health Organisation, that pandemics can be contained by the rapid responses of medical bureaucracies, independent of the quality of local public health. Since the initial H5N1 deaths in Hong Kong in 1997, the WHO, with the support of most national health services, has promoted a strategy focused on the identification and isolation of a pandemic strain within its local radius of outbreak, followed by a thorough dousing of the population with antivirals and (if available) vaccine.

An army of sceptics has contested this viral counter-insurgency approach, pointing out that microbes can now fly around the world (quite literally in the case of avian flu) faster than WHO or local officials can react to the original outbreak. They also pointed to the primitive, often non-existent surveillance of the interface between human and animal diseases. But the mythology of bold, preemptive (and cheap) intervention against avian flu has been invaluable to the cause of rich countries, like the US and UK, who prefer to invest in their own biological Maginot lines rather than dramatically increasing aid to epidemic frontlines overseas, as well as to big pharma, which has battled developing-world demands for the generic, public manufacture of critical antivirals like Roche's Tamiflu.

Since its identification during the Great Depression, H1N1 swine flu had only drifted slightly from its original genome. Then in 1998 a highly pathogenic strain began to decimate sows on a farm in North Carolina and new, more virulent versions began to appear almost yearly, including a variant of H1N1 that contained the internal genes of H3N2 (the other type-A flu circulating among humans).

Researchers interviewed by Science worried that one of these hybrids might become a human flu (both the 1957 and 1968 pandemics are believed to have originated from the mixing of bird and human viruses inside pigs), and urged the creation of an official surveillance system for swine flu: an admonition, of course, that went unheeded in a Washington prepared to throw away billions on bioterrorism fantasies.

But what caused this acceleration of swine flu evolution? Virologists have long believed that the intensive agricultural system of southern China is the principal engine of influenza mutation: both seasonal "drift" and episodic genomic "shift". But the corporate industrialisation of livestock production has broken China's natural monopoly on influenza evolution. Animal husbandry in recent decades has been transformed into something that more closely resembles the petrochemical industry than the happy family farm depicted in school readers.

In 1965, for instance, there were 53m US hogs on more than 1m farms; today, 65m hogs are concentrated in 65,000 facilities. This has been a transition from old-fashioned pig pens to vast excremental hells, containing tens of thousands of animals with weakened immune systems suffocating in heat and manure while exchanging pathogens at blinding velocity with their fellow inmates.

Last year a commission convened by the Pew Research Center issued a report on "industrial farm animal production" that underscored the acute danger that "the continual cycling of viruses … in large herds or flocks [will] increase opportunities for the generation of novel virus through mutation or recombinant events that could result in more efficient human to human transmission." The commission also warned that promiscuous antibiotic use in hog factories (cheaper than humane environments) was sponsoring the rise of resistant staph infections, while sewage spills were producing outbreaks of E coli and pfiesteria (the protozoan that has killed 1bn fish in Carolina estuaries and made ill dozens of fishermen).

Any amelioration of this new pathogen ecology would have to confront the monstrous power of livestock conglomerates such as Smithfield Farms (pork and beef) and Tyson (chickens). The commission reported systemic obstruction of their investigation by corporations, including blatant threats to withhold funding from cooperative researchers .

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/apr/27/swine-flu-mexico-health

from Crikey ….

Swine flu pandemics and other porkies

Canberra correspondent Bernard Keane writes:

The human capacity for self-distraction is astonishing.

In terms of impacts on human lives, the current outbreak of Swine Flu in North America is minimal compared to hundreds of other issues. This morning we had the remarkable sight of the US Homeland Security Secretary dolefully intoning that Americans would inevitably die from Swine Flu.

Except, Americans will inevitably die from flu any time. Whether it is one specific strain of flu or another would, particularly to the victims, seem to be moot. Particularly elderly victims, many in nursing homes, whose deaths are frequently attributed to flu in the same way that police tend to blame motor vehicle accidents on speed i.e. because it’s a convenient thing to write on the form.

The US Homeland Security Department in fact would save far more lives if it directed some of the resources now being allocated to fighting Swine Flu to gun control. Firearms will account for thousands of deaths in US in the course of this year. Motor vehicle accidents will take plenty of Americans as well. One could go on. Breast cancer. Falls in the elderly. SIDS.

All real priorities but Swine Flu -- the pig link is so compelling isn’t it -- gets the attention, despite accounting for fewer deaths than a week’s road toll.

Predictably, politicians here have seized on the opportunity to look simultaneously caring but stern, and assure voters that they’ll be protected. Here there has been talk of detention powers – seemingly the inevitable Australia response – to make sure we remain Swine Flu free. God help any boat people landing on Christmas Island while running a fever. And we can’t control that nationalistic instinct, can we -- we have the biggest Tamiflu stockpiles in the world, according to Nicola Roxon. Once again, we’re ahead of the curve and leading the world. To paraphrase Wayne Swan, every Health Minister in the world would gladly swap places with us.

Egging the politicians on has been the mainstream media, which has led every bulletin with the latest trivial update on the death toll (or, as it was rendered in the SMH yesterday as the first doubts were cast on the hype, "probably deaths"). Plagues sell papers, of course, and what better way to get those eyeballs locked back in than to spread panic and suggest I Am Legend is just around the corner.

The World Health Organisation put paid to some of the more hysterical coverage today by saying there had only been seven confirmed deaths. Let’s see if that takes the panic-stricken edge off the some of the coverage, which seems aimed solely at stoking public concern rather than accurately informing the public.

The UN's World Health Organization has raised the alert over the spread of swine flu to level five - one short of a full-blown pandemic.

A phase five alert means human-to-human transmission in at least two countries.

The move comes after a 23-month-old Mexican child died in Texas - the first death from swine flu outside Mexico, where the outbreak originated.

In Spain, officials confirmed the first case of swine flu in a person who has not travelled to Mexico.

Announcing the latest alert level after an emergeny WHO meeting in Geneva, Director General Margaret Chan urged all countries to activate their pandemic plans, including heightened surveillance and infection-control measures.

She said action should be undertaken with "increased urgency".

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One should be alerted that many large pig farms use a lot of antibiotics to "keep the pigs healthy and make them grow faster" but there is a good chance that they have a potential role in the rise of anti-bacterial resistance, apart from livng in conditions unfit for a pig...

Ah, the freedom of being a wild boar roaming the salty mud flats at the bottom of the Gulf of Carpentaria... Hot mud baths, root and roots, in vast landscapes where it's difficult to know where a hot sea starts or ends, except for a thin long line of calitris pines on a low narrow sand ridge that is only interrupted from time to time by twisted Mandelbrotic rivers of salt at low tide and a sea to both side of the horizon at high tide... Feral pigs — introduced species, surviving in a place where no one dares to go — having a good time, after having escaped from the nasty little pens built by humans for their morn bacon... Just watch for those nifty crocs though... Life's a swine.