Protect Yourself
While the risk of death appears to be lower than previously thought, it’s not nice to get sick and a small percentage of people who do get sick will die. Follow the generally published advice including covering your mouth when you sneeze, washing your hands often and if you are in an area of an outbreak, avoid crowded or enclosed places where the virus can spread.
Respect Others, Including Mexicans
The virus has now spread over a large area, and anyone can be infected. There is no reason to single out any ethnic group as being more at risk, not the least of which Mexicans. Everyone deserves to be treated with respect. Don’t use the flu outbreak as an excuse to be racist.
Don’t Eat Pork
It doesn’t matter how often we’re told it’s safe to eat pork products.
Many people feel it’s a point of debate if pork or factory farm pork is healthy in the first place. It’s not the point if it’s safe, the point is factory pig farming was most likely behind the current flu outbreak, and we should vote with our pocketbooks! The best thing would be to completely give up eating factory farm (pork) products, but at least during the current crisis let your anger at the situation be known by refusing to buy the products behind it.
Don’t listen to the arguments it will hurt the economy or leave people unemployed. This industry needs to be restructured as much as any other, just like the car manufacturers are in trouble for building out of date cars, the food industry is just as out of date. The world’s food industry is the largest global source of greenhouse gasses, looks likely to be exempt from Kyoto Protocol limits, and these methods of raising food are killing the planet.
Stand Up to Corporate Welfare
You can be assured after the crisis passes the politicians will all be lining up to give the factory farming industry compensation over their losses. This will most certainly be done quietly and they will hope no one notices. Watch out for this, take a stand against it, and spread the word so others can voice their opposition too.
Support the Rights of the Workers
A lot of people will lose their jobs in the wake of this crisis. Support their rights to severance pay, unemployment benefits, health care and assistance finding other jobs.
I want to start by saying I think people should vote with their wallets if they hate factory farming. I think there is a lot wrong with it. However I think saying the flu is a reason to do this is wrong. Most of our flus come from Asia. This is because people there live closely with their animals (pigs and fowl). This is the opposite of factory farming and the close interaction is what causes most of the flu mutations to get into the human population. It is actually very rare for a flu to come from factory farming. Other things about factory farming are just wrong, but this isn’t one of them.
Hi Daphne,
Thanks for leaving a comment! It was seeming quiet on the flu posts, and it’s nice to hear from you.
While I think what you say here was probably at one time true, a lot has changed in Asia in the last decade or two and it’s now home to some of the world’s largest factory farming operations. Indonesia is a good example of this. In addition, the tradition of small animal holdings is in decline, in part because of factory farms and recent flu outbreaks. This really came to a head during the last round of bird flu.
Did anyone ever tell you when you were growing up that you had to finish the food on your plate because people were starving in China? Now people are getting fat in China, just like the rest of us, in a large part thanks to factory farms.
Many influential people, including scientists, make the argument the other way around from you. They say modern flu’s like the H5N1 bird flu mostly come from factory farming, and the people of Asia tending small holdings are the victims of these crisis.
During the time of the H5N1 bird flu, the operators of the factory farms identified the small holdings and wild migratory birds as being the source of the outbreaks, but rather what was happening was outbreaks were occurring in factory farms and being carried from one factory farm to next by these birds. The factory farms had large numbers of birds with weak immune systems in unsanitary conditions, and if these farms weren’t there it wouldn’t have been possible for the bird flu to spread in the same way. In fact the H5N1 bird flu would likely have just not been an issue, if it even emerged at all.
If you want to read more about it, GRAIN did a number of articles on it:
http://www.grain.org/birdflu/
By the way, it also appears the way bird flu was finally dealt with was to shut down many of the larger factory farms, and take steps to boost the birds immune systems like discontinuing use of GM grains which seemed to be playing a role in this. This was all quietly arranged by the factory farming industry, with no independent oversight, so it’s hard to know exactly what did happen.
But okay, I take your point too. Who do you trust? Do you trust me who says the flu started in the factory farm, or do you trust Smithfield Farms who says the flu started somewhere else and doesn’t have anything to do with their pigs?
One of the problems is there is no one out there with free access to all the available information, leading the investigation into this virus, with any credibility or making any effort to provide unbiased information.
When the farming industry decides to change the name from Swine Flu to something else, to protect their reputation, and has the clout to press this change on both the White House and the WHO, to me this is a clear indication that they are not acting in the best interests of the public and cannot be trusted. There are many other indications as well, including the large numbers of people with dissenting points of view.
If you like, you can take the position that everything we are told ‘officially’ is true until it’s proved wrong. We were told this virus had nothing to do with pigs, but then a few days later a flock of Canadian pigs caught it. We were told it had nothing to do with Smithfield Farms, but we now know the little boy who was the first to be infected and lived right next to the farm. We were told there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq! We still don’t have ‘the smoking pig’ as one commentator put it, but with free access to Smithfield Farms and enough resources we could almost certainly pinpoint this. Over time all of these things will be proved or forgotten, but the truth of what happened won’t change.
Did you know it wasn’t proved until the 1990s that tobacco caused cancer or was addicting? Until that time the tobacco companies were still able to deny it.
In any case, this isn’t a game I play, and I don’t take the approach that things must be proved without doubt first. What I do is make my own assessment on what sources of information I find most reliable, and I make posts on things that I feel are the most likely to be true. I feel it’s just as much Smithfield Farms responsibility to prove the virus didn’t come from their farm as the other way around.
Of course I can be wrong, and I’ll be the first to admit that. This is both the power and risk of the Internet.
So, make your own choice! Believe what I say about Smithfield Farms CAFO flu, or what a traditional news source says about A(H1N1) flu. I won’t be offended if you don’t choose me.
Whoever you decide to believe, I hope you keep reading this blog, and keep letting me know what you think.