Factory Farm “Manure Lagoons” Linked To Swine Flu Outbreak
by Spence Cooper on 29/04/09 at 8:18 am
Manure Pits
Mexico’s earliest confirmed case of swine flu was a five-year-old boy named Edgar Hernandez of La Gloria, Perote Municipality, Veracruz State, Mexico, also home of Granjas Carroll Farm, a subsidiary of Smithfield Foods, the world’s largest pork packer and hog producer; Granjas Carroll Farm raises 950,000 hogs per year.
Grist Magazine’s Tom Phillpot reports that the U.S. disease-tracking blog Biosurveillance published a timeline of the outbreak that included this April 6 entry:
Residents [of Perote] believed the outbreak had been caused by contamination from pig breeding farms located in the area. They believed that the farms, operated by Granjas Carroll, polluted the atmosphere and local water bodies, which in turn led to the disease outbreak. According to residents, the company denied responsibility for the outbreak and attributed the cases to “flu.” However, a municipal health official stated that preliminary investigations indicated that the disease vector was a type of fly that reproduces in pig waste and that the outbreak was linked to the pig farms. It was unclear whether health officials had identified a suspected pathogen responsible for this outbreak.
Phillpot reports the connection was also made by two Mexican papers: the Vera Cruz-based paper La Marcha, and the Mexico City daily La Jornada. Both newspapers report that the “Mexican health agency IMSS acknowledged the original carrier for the flu could be the ‘clouds of flies‘ that multiply in the Smithfield subsidiary’s manure lagoons“.
AP’s Olga Rodriguez reports that Edgar’s (the five-year-old boy) mother, Maria del Carmen Hernandez, complained that as early as “February, neighbors all around her were coming down with unusually strong flu symptoms — and the caseload kept growing. When state health workers came to investigate March 23, some 1,300 people sought their medical help. About 450 were diagnosed with acute respiratory infections and sent home with antibiotics and surgical masks.”
Confirmation that the boy was infected with H1N1, reports AP, wasn’t made until last week, when signs of the outbreak elsewhere prompted a second look at his sample.
According to AP’s reporter, “Jose Luis Martinez, a 34-year-old resident of the town, made the swine flu connection the minute he heard a description of the symptoms on the news: fever, coughing, joint aches, severe headache and, in some cases, vomiting and diarrhea.”
“When we saw it on the television, we said to ourselves, ‘This is what we had,’” he said Monday. “It all came from here. … The symptoms they are suffering are the same that we had here.”
Two infants died of pneumonia during the La Gloria outbreak. They were buried without testing. Juan Rodriguez died of pneumonia in February at age 7 months, and a 2-month-old boy, Yovanni Apolinar, died March.
Upwind, five miles north, toxins from pig waste at Granjas Carroll farms blow downwind and get trapped by mountains in La Gloria, say the townspeople, who suspect their water and air has been contaminated by pig waste. Granjas Carroll de Mexico has 72 farms in the surrounding area.
