Has anyone been following the story of the source of the outbreak as told by biosurveillance firm Veratect? They say that in early April they picked up reports of an unusual respiratory disease in a town in Veracruz, called La Gloria, possibly linked to pollution from the local Smithfield Foods pork production plant. A story in today’s Guardian poses the question of whether this respiratory disease was fact the first outbreak of the swine flu. For the “pathogenic globalization” analysis, see this post in MyDD by Charles Lemos.
Biosurveillance and Industrial Pig Farming
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The search for Case Zero is proving to be multi-threaded at the moment.
The farm operator cited by the Veratect timeline (Granjas Carroll) is owned by the worlds largest hog processor (Smithfield Foods), and many food activist bloggers are taking hold of this and implicating industrialized farming as the main culprit—the woman who broke the connection on the Comfood listserv asked on Saturday: “is this even theoretically possible with small-scale organic hog farming?â€
Like I mentioned in a comment before, Mexican news media is also pointing to the ‘confined animal feeding operations’ in Veracruz as the epicenter.
Here: http://www.marcha.com.mx/resumen.php?id=2128
And here: http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2009/04/06/index.php?section=estados&article=030n1est
Both articles cite clouds of arthropod vectors (flies) as the means of species hoping, flies that swarmed improperly handled excrement.
But I think the Mexican government is nodding towards the city of Oaxaca as of a press conference yesterday. Some are referring to this case as the origin http://www.eluniversal.com.mx/nacion/167576.html
(this article cites ‘swine flu’ case in Oaxaca far earlier than the one documented in the Veratect timeline)
Going on my limited Mexican history knowledge, fingering the oft rebellious and most indigenous state of Oaxaca isn’t politically unprecedented. Also, I am not sure how the species leap is thought to have occurred there.
So, there are a lot of competing agendas in the construction of origin narratives, from a fellow on Huff-Post who is trying to sell is soon to be published book industrialized animal production to health advocates in Veracruz who are hoping to bring attention to a long standing wellness issue to the Mexican government pointing south. I am not trying to say that any of these claims are unfounded, just that the parties making these claims are not surprising. It is hard to gauge epidemiological validity at this moment, but surely there are more narratives to come.
is Veratect an example of the success or failure of biosurveillance? The Mexican Health minister in response to to questions at a press conference regarding Veratect’s early warning of the event, allegedly criticized Veratect for not notifying the relevant authorities. This seems to be contradicted by the fact that the CDC and WHO are, from what I gather, clients of Veratect. Also, the timeline he has been running at the above address stops on April 27th,m presumably he was getting heavily criticized for making the allusion to Granjas Carroll.
Erin Koch over at Somatosphere posted a piece yesterday weighing in on the symptomatic-of-late-capitalism side of the origin debate.
http://www.somatosphere.net/2009/04/emerging-thoughts-on-swine-flu.html
The problematic that many of these bloggers are assembling with respect to A(H1N1) is very similar to those of One Health that I posted about a couple weeks ago. Yet they locate hierarchic and non-synergistic inter-species relations within a critique of capitalism. Haraway peels off somewhere in between the One Health and Anti-Global Capitalism camps with her autre (not anti) mondialisation inspired ‘retying of the knots of ordinary multispecies living’.
Nick – I think this point is worth pursuing further: “there are a lot of competing agendas in the construction of origin narratives, from a fellow on Huff-Post who is trying to sell is soon to be published book industrialized animal production to health advocates in Veracruz who are hoping to bring attention to a long standing wellness issue to the Mexican government pointing south”. So we might begin to catalogue the kinds of “diagnoses” that are emerging – whether about our lack of preparedness, about the role of global capitalism, about the lack of enforcement power of centralized agencies such as WHO (see David Brooks today), etc.
I wonder if some of the swine diagnoses will shift now as the ‘official’ ontology veers in an originless direction at the beck of the hog industry.
In line with the WHO, Veratect also switched to exclusively using A/H1N1 in the text of their twitter messages, yet vestiges of the relinquished name remain in their tags– now their messages are tagged with both ‘#swineflu’ and ‘#H1N1′.
Or, perhaps the swine ‘etiology’ will just be reinforced as the signifier is retooled. The CDCEmergency twitter account was referring to it as “Swine-Origin Influenza A (H1N1)” for a while. Perhaps that is just a transitional name, but surely the pork industry preferred the genetic justification for the “swine” that merely connoted pig parentage.
It would also be interesting to see when this virus was first specifically labeled as ‘swine’ …