Word: farm
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...attempt to answer that question, but one way to begin is to look at where the virus originated. Epidemiologists appear to be homing in on a possible ground zero in the Mexican Gulf Coast state of Veracruz, in a town called Perote, which is home to a large pig farm owned by the U.S. company Smithfield Foods. Flu-like cases began popping up there in early April, before the first confirmed case in Mexico on April...
...this made the flu virus a tenacious foe from the outset, but once humans invented farming and learned to cultivate animals, we made a bad situation much worse. All at once, chickens, ducks and pigs - which never had much to do with one another - began living cheek to jowl in high numbers and often unsanitary conditions. Farm families and people working in live markets then began mingling with the critters. That's a pathogenic speed blender, and the viruses have taken full advantage of it. "It's really an ecological issue," says Daszak...
...This year I wrote my senior thesis on those cages. What struck me most forcefully was how the horrific has become normal. Last week, a pig factory farm in Shuyer County, Illinois, burnt down. The owners had economized by neither installing a sprinkler system nor a night watchman who could release the pigs. In the ensuing blaze, 11,000 pigs were burnt alive, many struggling frantically to escape their cages—firefighters recalled the horrific squeals they heard. Yet nothing changed. The owners promptly claimed insurance and will soon rebuild their factory farm...
...later to become a strict vegetarian. I’ve never fully accepted any abstract theory of animal rights, nor do I think one needs to in order to sense that something has gone horribly wrong. For me, the horrors of the slaughterhouse and the suffering of the factory farm attest to that...
...Gloria outbreak may also give clues about the origins of the virus. The community is a few miles from an industrial pig farm Granjas Carroll de Mexico, which is 50% owned by Virginia-based Smithfield Foods, Inc. Residents have complained for several years about effluent - composed of animal waste and porcine feces - dumped by the farm and accuse it of making them fall sick. However, government agricultural experts joined the company in saying they have found no traces of swine flu in its hundreds of workers or thousands of hogs and piglets...