Judy Trunnell, the first U. S. citizen to die from the new H1N1 flu virus, left behind a 4-year-old daughter and a days-old baby girl. Her husband, Steven, struggles to find answers and justice in the wake of such a tragedy.
Steven has filed suit against Smithfield Foods, Inc., the world’s largest hog producer and pig processor, whose pig farm in La Gloria, Veracruz, Mexico, is reported to raise 1 million pigs annually under “horrifically unsanitary conditions.” The petition will enable Trunnell’s attorneys to investigate any role that the farm may have played in the H1N1 outbreak.
Thus far, the Smithfield farm has denied any clinical evidence of the new H1N1 virus in its swine, and health officials have reported no evidence to link the farm with the “swine flu” outbreak. The public is still suffering from the rampant distribution of misinformation.
While answers to all our questions about the H1N1 outbreak will likely be a long time coming, one thing we do know is that unsanitary farming and agroprocessing conditions act as a huge Petri dish for foodborne pathogen growth and the risk of the origin of new diseases. According to a report by the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production (see resources in original document):
As previously mentioned, one of the most serious unintended consequences of industrial food animal production (IFAP) is the growing public health threat of these types of facilities. In addition to the contribution of IFAP to the major threat of antimicrobial resistance, IFAP facilities can be harmful to workers, neighbors, and even those living far from the facilities through air and water pollution, and via the spread of disease….In addition, workers can serve as a bridging population, transmitting animal-borne diseases to a wider population.
Photographer Benedicte Desrus posts to Flickr photos of the blood-, manure-, and waste-filled lagoon on the site of the Smithfield farm, along with other images displaying the unsightly reality of modern factory farming. Filth like this must be eliminated if we’re ever to improve the status of food safety and public health.
Richard J. Arsenault, 2011
