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The website of the World Health Organisation refers calmly to something called influenza A(H1N1). But the world’s media saw the name swine flu, and perhaps not surprisingly homed in on an intensive pig-rearing facility in Mexico as the outbreak’s source—wrongly, as it turned out. Underneath this reaction lay a feeling that industrial agriculture makes modern pandemics more likely—even though there is almost no evidence for this at all.
The British consumer is usually ambivalent about animal welfare, condemning battery chickens but buying them nonetheless. The BSE crisis in the 1990s led to the slaughter of 4.5m cattle and made public some of the (undoubtedly unsavoury) practices involved in making cheap protein for humans, not least feeding the remains of cattle to other cattle. Since then the environmental movement, with its simplistic view of farming—small equals good, big equals bad—has joined with popular campaigns by Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall to spread a new hostility towards large-scale farming. To many it seemed intuitively right that something as nasty as a pandemic flu must, somehow, have come from this heart of darkness.
But the facts tell a different story. A study by the respected US Centre for Disease Control and Prevention seems to show that swine flu came from a “triple reassortment” of different flu virus genes—pig, avian and human—and that the pig elements also include a genetic contribution from a European strain of swine flu. Since European pigs rarely, if ever, travel as far as Mexico, the reassortment vessel—the physical body in which these various viruses combined—was likely to be human, not swine. World Health Organisation (WHO) officials think that the first case may have been a young boy in southern California, with no pig contact at all. Ultimately, human beings are more likely to have given influenza A(H1N1) to pigs than the other way round.
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