Word: viruses
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...late April, Dominguez Trunnell, who was eight months pregnant, became ill with what would eventually be confirmed as H1N1 flu. While the vast majority of victims of the virus - there have been more than 4,700 probable and confirmed cases in the U.S. - have recovered without complications, Dominguez Trunnell grew sicker, eventually being placed on a ventilator. Early this month Dominguez Trunnell passed away, weeks after her baby daughter was delivered via cesarean section. "She was a fun and caring person," Trunnell tells TIME. "She didn't deserve this." (See pictures of H1N1 flu hitting Mexico...
Trunnell's petition seeks to investigate claims that the H1N1 outbreak began in Smithfield's massive pork operation in La Gloria and that the virus may have been caused in part by the conditions under which the farm operates, which the petition terms "horrifically unsanitary...
...following through with a wrongful-death suit against Smithfield Foods, it will most likely make legal history. No one has ever tried to hold a corporation responsible for the inadvertent creation of an infectious disease. Trunnell and his lawyer, Marc Rosenthal, do not claim that Smithfield purposely bred the virus, but rather that its Perote operation, which raises some 1 million pigs annually in close quarters, established the necessary conditions for the virus to arise. If Smithfield had taken better care of its farm, the petition claims, H1N1 might never have been introduced to the world...
...According to the World Health Organization, the number of people infected worldwide stands, as of Monday morning, at 4,694, of which 95 cases have occurred in Spain. And some evidence seems to point to a factory pig farm in La Gloria, Mexico, as a possible source for the virus. But among the scientists, producers, regulators and distributors who had gathered in Aracena, just down the road from Jabugo, to network and listen to scientists discussing the latest innovations in pig breeding and ham raising, no one was willing to admit concern about what the future might hold for their...
...Which may help explain why officials opened the congress with a manifesto that called on national and international authorities to "avoid adopting measures that unnecessarily hurt the pork sector." (Needless to say, the statement referred to the virus as H1N1, not swine flu.) A few days earlier, Russia had banned the import of Spanish pork products in response to the relatively high number of swine flu cases in Spain. For Anatoly Gendin, a reporter covering the conference for a Moscow-based culinary magazine, the ban is simply a measure of caution. "It's not always easy to explain the fine...