COVER STORY/THE
waste against the food giant. While this fact was never followed up or uncovered, what was reported was that food majors wanted WHO to change the name of the contagion so that pork eating would not be affected. Virologists at the CDC, however, based on genetic fingerprinting found that the strain of this swine flu is the same as first identified on industrial pig farms in North Carolina, the hub of industrial pig farms in USA.
The H1N1 strain is high on the evolutionary ladder. In 1998, when there was an outbreak of swine flu among pig herds in North Carolina, it was a triple hybrid—containing gene segments from human, bird and classical swine influenza
PLAGUE (bubonic)
raised in tightly confined, often poorly ventilated enclosures with regular exposure to chemicals, blood and faecal matter. Diseases can spread, and spread fast, in such conditions. Since the birds also have lowered immunity because of their genetic uniformity, they are almost literally sitting ducks when a disease hits.
But after avian flu hit Asia, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) told governments that while it would be possible to tighten biosafety in commercial poultry farms, it would be impossible to do it in non-commercial enterprises, such as backyard production systems where flocks forage outdoors. It recommended animal production should move to larger farms where surveillance is possible. Danielle Nierenberg, who researches this sector at Washingtonbased Worldwatch Institute, reports that this prompted Vietnam in April 2005 to impose a ban on live poultry markets and asking farms to convert to factorystyle methods.
This is when, the need of the hour was to regulate the industrial processes of growing chicken so that the virus does not breed and does not grow. The business needed to improve the genetic stock of birds and raise their immunity against diseases, just the way traditional backyard poultry farmers do. But instead of reforming the poultry industry, the containment of the flu ended up promoting the very industry and its practices and destroyed the livelihoods of small and marginal farmers.
SARS
CHOLERA
ZIKA VIRUS
YELLOW FEVER