“Dear folks,

There is a lot more to the swine flu outbreak than a virus and a vaccine: There is, surprise surprise, a political-economic context.

First of all, the press in Mexico has been reporting that swine flu may have originated in the factory farming of pigs by Smithfield Foods (the world’s largest pork packer and hog producer).

Smithfield has a major plant in Mexico -at Perote in the state of Vera Cruz, where the outbreak originated. The operations, grouped under a Smithfield subsidiary called Granjas Carrol, raise 950,000 hogs per year.

The Vera Cruz-based paper La Marcha wrote this headline: “Granjas Carroll, causa de epidemia en La Gloria.”
http://www.marcha.com.mx/resumen.php?id=2128

The Mexico City daily La Jornada has also made the link — saying that the Mexican health agency IMSS has acknowledged that the original carrier for the flu could be the “clouds of flies” that multiply in the Smithfield subsidiary’s manure lagoons.
http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=zPA3ooBfBpNeNcrwP3%2Fv%2Fwz%2FWQDnuz3v

Please note that one week into the epidemic, not a single major American newspaper has reported even the possibility that factory farming may be implicated in swine flu. The power of the meat industry could not be more graphically underlined. (In President Obama’s most recent news conference, he even used an esoteric medical name for the virus to avoid mentioning the connection with pigs.)

There is also another political link. When the Stimulus Bill (”Recovery Act”) came to the floor of Congress, it included appropriations of almost a billion dollars to prepare for a possible flu pandemic. But Karl Rove organized Republicans to demand that this money be taken out of the bill, and when Senator Susan M. Collins of Maine agreed to vote down a filibuster against the bill, one of her demands was that the pandemic appropriation be stripped out. It was.

Somehow the notion that health is more than a private personal concern, that it involves the whole community and indeed the whole planet, has escaped the attention of some who call themselves “conservatives.” “

http://narconews.com/Issue57/article3512.html

How “The NAFTA Flu” Exploded
Smithfield Farms Fled US Environmental Laws to Open a Gigantic Pig Farm in Mexico, and All We Got Was this Lousy Swine Flu

By Al Giordano
Special to The Narco News Bulletin

April 29, 2009

US and Mexico authorities claim that neither knew about the “swine flu” outbreak until April 24. But after hundreds of residents of a town in Veracruz, Mexico, came down with its symptoms, the story had already hit the Mexican national press by April 5. The daily La Jornada reported:

Clouds of flies emanate from the rusty lagoons where the Carroll Ranches business tosses the fecal wastes of its pig farms, and the open-air contamination is already generating an epidemic of respiratory infections in the town of La Gloria, in the Perote Valley, according to Town Administrator Bertha Crisóstomo López.

The town has 3,000 inhabitants, hundreds of whom reported severe flu symptoms in March.