Blame the industry, not the pig.

Mike Davis’s article focusing on swine flu makes me remember coming home from studying abroad in Argentina on a plane with the flight attendants all wearing masks over their mouths. I was surprised by these preventive measures that were be taken to reduce one’s risk of getting the swine flu. This swine flu “outbreak” appeared to the public as a problem that the government knew little about. But was this really true? Was there previous knowledge of this problem but a lack of initiatives taken? As citizens of the United States, we put our trust into the hands of the government to make sure they are doing whatever they can to keep us safe. But sometimes the government knows about a potential problem but doesn’t fix it before it is too late. The government’s inability to manage risk reduces the chance of taking effective, preventive measures. While the government was warned by scientists to increase specialized technology to other countries that were in “direct path of likely pandemics”, nothing was done. Since Mexico didn’t have this technology, it took a week to get the positive results that they did have a case of swine. How does the public accept these conditions? Shouldn’t we expect more?

While we could just blame the government for not listening to the warnings, there are other people to blame. The way that industrialized agriculture is managed, may I say, encourages the spread of outbreaks. The overcrowded, cramped conditions leads to a “continual cycling of viruses.” This can result is mutations of the virus that can increase the “efficiency of human to human transmission. “ Since the power of these industries is so concentrated, these methods are rarely questioned. We trust the food industry to keep our food safe, but do they deserve this credit? The pandemic strategy of WHO is to contain an outbreak with “rapid responses of medical buracreacies,” but maybe the solution should focus on listening to potential risks and making the changes we need in the industrial agriculture system to make sure this doesn’t happen again.