Those Swine in the West

Anything they breed has had its own global emergency. Could that be why we’ve been spared a goat flu scare?

Swine flu, bird flu, mad cow disease… it seems like any animal that you’d care to eat is a source of a deadly illness that spreads to humans through contact with the animal or consumption of its meat. But look at that list again, carefully. One animal consumed commonly in India does not figure there, the humble goat that goes into the most succulent items in Indian cuisine—kebabs. This is hardly a coincidence. The West has not turned goat meat into a delicacy. In fact, what they call ‘mutton’ comes mostly from sheep. As a result, goats are not a product of ‘Contained animal feeding operations’, a euphemism for meat factories. Globalisation has passed them by, at least as far as cuisine goes.

Perhaps too much has been made of the West’s insatiable appetite and everything inflicted upon the world by all the shortcuts taken to satiate it, but you may still count the recession and swine flu as two extreme but valid examples. While theories abound on the immediate origin of swine flu, information provided by Columbia University biomedical informaticist Raul Rabadan indicates that the genetic lineage of the new H1N1 swine flu goes back to the strain H3N2 that emerged in 1998 in US factory farms in North Carolina. Six years ago, Science magazine, in a report on this new strain, had said that ‘after years of stability, the North American swine flu virus had jumped on an evolutionary fast track’.  Experts had at the time cautioned against the possibility of a pandemic.

That something like this would happen on factory farms, those business exemplars of ‘operational efficiency’, was a foregone conclusion. Suppose you want to design a super-flu virus, what would the ideal conditions be? The first would be the availability of plenty of host animals that are prey to virus strains that also affect human beings. The next would be having these animals in close mutual proximity, preferably in some enclosure, so that the virus gets a good chance to multiply, and multiply fast. Now, if you need the virus to evolve into something particularly virulent, you would ensure that the host animals have a robust immune system as well.

In short, the ideal breeding ground for a superflu virus is the kind of factory farm used to harvest chicken, beef or pigs.

Consider this description of cattle being fattened for slaughter in US feedlots from Eric Schlosser’s book Fast Food Nation, a veritable expose on farm practices that ought to horrify the world—‘Each of them can hold up to one hundred thousand heads of cattle. At times the animals are crowded so closely together it looks like a sea of cattle, a mooing, moving mass of brown and white fur that goes on for acres… During the three months before slaughter, they eat grain dumped into long concrete troughs that resemble highway dividers. The grain fattens the cattle quickly, aided by the anabolic steroid implanted in their ear. A typical steer will consume three thousand pounds of grain during its stay at a feedlot, just to gain four hundred pounds in weight… Each steer deposits about fifty pounds of urine and manure every day. Unlike human waste, the manure is not sent to a treatment plant. It is dumped into pits, huge pools of excrement that the industry calls ‘lagoons’.’

In their market-driven need to fatten cattle as quickly as physically possible, industry players have adopted even more extreme shortcuts. Till August 1997, the vast majority of cattle in the US were fed remains of dead sheep and cattle, as well as dead cats and dogs. The practice was banned only after it became clear that the same practice in the UK had led to mad cow disease or bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE).

Apart from such a diet, a regular dose of antibiotics is fed to all animals in factory farms to ensure that overcrowding does not lead to any spread of disease. For the meat industry, this practice has also resulted in a happy side-effect—animals reared on antibiotics from a young age tend to be larger and heavier than other animals. The probable cause? The body diverts resources used for maintaining the immune system towards
bodily growth. But this also ensures that diseases which evolve under precisely such conditions tend to become increasingly resistant to antibiotics, and when they actually spread to humans, there is often no defence available. In alarm, the European Union has outlawed this practice, but an attempt to do so in the US last year was overturned at the last moment.

The one animal for which such factory practices have been standard across the world is broiler chicken. The business of rearing hatchlings in constrained circumstances in feedlots has proved so efficient that traditional poultry practices have disappeared in much of the world. And it is in exactly such conditions that the H5N1 virus responsible for the flu evolved in factory farms in China and Southeast Asia.

To come back to the current episode that has set health experts aflutter, swine flu is not even a case of the developing world adopting Western methods; the link is more immediate. Soon after the flu became public news, health organisations zeroed in on a young boy in the town of La Gloria in Mexico. This was the first reported case of swine flu, and in his neighbourhood was a huge factory-farm pig operation owned by the US corporate major Smithfield and operated by its Mexican subsidiary, Granjas Carroll de Mexico.

The instant guess was that swine flu originated from this particular farm. So far, no evidence has emerged that this was really the source of the epidemic. Yet, there is no evidence ruling out this possibility either. What is certain, though, is that the strain evolved in a pig farm much like the one at La Gloria. A chain of contamination across factory farms would link the 1998 strain that emerged in North Carolina to the strain the world must contend with now.

The warning of experts then is turning into a real nightmare, and it’s clear where the blame lies. With over 200 million heads, the Indian cattle population is twice that of the US. Yet, no threat has ever emerged despite these animals living in close proximity to humans, as they have for centuries. The reason should not be such a big mystery, really. The factory conditions that led to the problem simply do not exist in India. In other words, the problem is not with the number of animals, but the methods adopted to raise them.

The trouble is that this realisation has still not hit home where the current crisis began—the factory farm-happy West. Consider this 30 April Reuters science report that sought to debunk a raft of ‘theories’ about the flu, ‘Dead pigs in China, evil factory farms in Mexico and an Al Qaeda plot involving Mexican drug cartels are a few wild theories seeking to explain a deadly swine flu outbreak that has killed up to 176 people’.

Why the reporter refers to ‘dead pigs in China’ is not altogether clear. Could it be because China is to blame for all that is currently wrong with the world, including the recession? Or, for that matter, why it refers to an ‘Al Qaeda plot’. Could it again perhaps be that until China came to the fore, everything that happened anywhere was the fault of Al Qaeda?

The desperation to place those evil Mexican factory farms in the same category of menace, as revealed by the 30 April Reuters report, points to an unwillingness in the West to weigh the evidence in the interests of objectivity. Given such obduracy, there is little the world can do. In the short term, let’s hope that the heat in India keeps the flu at bay. As for the long term, indulge your appetite for kebabs over a desire for fast food reliant on factory farm methods. That’s one way of getting their goat and eating it too.

bird flufactory farmsfast food industrymad cow diseaseswine flu