WALL STREET JOURNAL/

Swine-Flu Hysteria

While many experts have dismissed some of the more apocalyptic rumours about the porcine plague as hogwash, WSJ has taken the trouble of making a list of the dumbest—or most disingenuous—responses to the swine flu. Those who made the cut include Egypt, which ordered a cull of the country’s 4,00,000 or so curly-tailed inhabitants. An Egyptian official was quoted as saying that the flu offered an excuse to curb “disorderly pig rearing” and, by implication, the Christian minority’s disorderly pig-eating. Runners-up were “protectionist Russia, which used the flu to ban imports from Spain and Canada” and anti-immigration Americans, who proposed that a wall along the Mexican border might prevent the virus from trotting across. But the clear winner, it says, is US Vice-President Joe Biden who demonstrated little of the craftiness the others did, only providing a distinguished mouthpiece for “panic proliferators” and claustrophobics when he went on NBC’s Today Show and said “I wouldn’t go anywhere in confined places now” and that he’d advised his family to stay away from planes and trains too.

WIRED MAGAZINE/

Swine Flu Ancestor Born on US

Factory Farms

Even as WHO and other agencies strove to remove the word “swine” from “flu” to avoid giving pig farms a bad name, “scientists have traced the genetic lineage of the new H1N1 swine flu to a strain that emerged in 1998 in US factory farms, where it spread and mutated at an alarming rate.” There was nothing ‘natural’ about the way the unholy trinity of pig, bird and human viruses combined to form the current strain of virulence. Nor did it begin in Mexico. Instead, industrial malpractices and negligence (often aided by poor policy) in US farms caused the virus to develop until it eventually—quoting from Science magazine—”jumped on an evolutionary fast track”. Wired explains: “Six of the genes in swine flu looked to be descended from “H1N2 and H3N2 swine viruses…(H3N2) is a hybrid first identified in North Carolina in 1998, a decade which saw the state’s hog production rise from two million to 10 million, even as the number of farms dropped.

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