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Officials in eastern Mexico may have located Patient Zero, Ground Zero in the swine flu crisis—the village of La Gloria.
By coincidence (yeah, me neither), Smithfield pork farms are located there.
By another coincidence (yeah, me neither), said Smithfield pork farms was fined for contaminating the watershed of Chesapeake Bay back in 2000 and subsequently moved to…ta, dah…the neighborhood of La Gloria.
There’s lot more to come on this story.
We can only hope the media will drop their face masks and their panic buttons long enough to actually report on the, oh, what’s the word…it’s been so long… oh, yeah… facts.
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crossposted at Prairie Sun Rising
8 Comments
For a great description of the development of an influenza pandemic, read ‘The Great Epidemic’ by John Barry. How the virus ‘jumps’ from the animal to human vector is important. Maybe this will focus attention on yet another risk of factory farming. An avian influnza virus would’t be good either.
Maybe the cable news crowd can be persuaded to take some time out of their alarmist, let’s show the face mask pictures long enough to actually look at this side of the story. I’ll be interested to watch how long/even whether they get around to reporting on the story I linked to from the UK.
Do you suppose the media see any irony in their hyperventilating over the way the airplane over NY scared people [which it did–a bonehead idea the president was quick to disclaim] while they proceed to scare people about the swine flu?
prairie, great diary here, thanx for the heads up, and the snark
Looks like Sebelius will get her “up or down” today.
Now if the other gurrrrlz that pallin’aroundwithsecessionists Cornyn and Co are obstructing would get their “up or down”s, maybe we could make even better progress on resetting America.
Is everybody referencing the original pandemic of 1918? It was also an American product, with one part Kansas farmboys living with their pigs and two parts US expansionist militarism with stuffing these farmers into close-packed barracks which was perfect for any virus and then unleashing our greatest export by far, the Flu Epidemic which killed maybe thirty million, probably many more, as our contribution to the Great War.
Disease is such a dull topic for news. Not like war and remembrance. Who cares about a bunch of flu bugs?
Thanks for the post PS!
wow!
It could be an obvious story as you say. Out of curiosity I would also wonder, in these strange times, who benefits.
On the downside, has someone bought an unusually large number of puts or naked CDSs on Smithfield (or whatever the parent company might be). I say that because the Mexican Ag Dept. is saying there’s no indication of swine flu in the hogs. Has someone set them up to take them down?
On the upside, who or what company would benefit from the existence of this flu? Is there a drug maker? Does someone benefit when there is less commerce with Mexico?
It’s awfully hard to take anything at face value these days. Take for example the fly-over of Manhattan. Isn’t that just the bomb? I mean really, who could see that and not wonder what that’s all about?
What is that scenario 12E?