Word: pigging
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...health officials, text-mining news reports and government resources for keywords related to infectious-disease outbreaks and using satellite images of weather patterns to detect and predict the progress of global events like disease and civil unrest. Veratect sources first picked up reports of human respiratory disease at a pig farm in Mexico on April 6; additional reports of a similar illness surfaced on April 16, which is when the company got concerned enough to e-mail officials at the CDC. The CDC was actually already connected to the Veratect news feed (in January, Veratect provided the CDC complimentary access...
...first glance, one might assume that a swine flu scare would send prices up, as pigs are widely slaughtered and supply disappears. Egypt, for instance, has begun slaughtering more than 300,000 presumably healthy pigs as a precautionary measure. However, the futures market is pricing hogs as if the fall in demand will outpace the drop in supply. (Read "Swine Flu: Don't Blame the Pig...
...situation is frustrating for pig producers: the fall in pork prices has nothing to do with meat contamination and everything to do with the phrase "swine flu." It is pure psychology...
...doorstep. "Now is the time to take the actions needed to prevent this," says Nathan Wolfe, director of the Global Viral Forecasting Initiative, which looks for new pathogens emerging from wildlife. One way to start would be to trace how, when and where the H1N1 virus emerged from pigs into people (or vice versa - over the weekend, Canada confirmed reports that a swine worker in Alberta passed the H1N1 virus to pigs). The H1N1 virus contains human, avian and swine flu genes, and genetic analysis indicates that it reassorted years ago, meaning it could have been in pig populations...
...easy. It took years to find the original animal sources of SARS and HIV, among other new diseases. What makes tracking emerging viruses inside wildlife populations all the more difficult is that animals - even more than people - move around a lot, across borders. The U.S. imports live pigs from Europe, while Mexico takes in some 600,000 pigs a year from the U.S., so it's entirely possible that the virus began in Europe (the H1N1 virus has Eurasian genes), then moved to America and Mexico with pigs before infecting the first human. "It's going to take several weeks...