I try to stay away from politics in this particular blog and focus on business instead, but one cannot help to take notice of the “swine flu” outbreak. The news is every where along with the warnings and the seemingly constant social reminders in the form of hand sanitizers or face masks. More  appropriately for this publication, is the scary ties to business that swine flu holds, but more on that in a bit.

First, a quick recap on swine flu. Swine flu (for those few of you who have not been bombarded by the hype of the situation) is a form of influenza called H1N1 by medical professionals and scientists. As the outbreak caps over 800 official cases today and slowly lunges towards a pandemic, there is some sense of panic. This is for good reason because this particular virus is a new hybrid virus formed by two variants of swine flu, one of avian flu, and one of human flu origins. In short, this is a virus we’ve never seen before. The result of virus breeding and Darwinism at its scariest. H1N1 refers to the underlying composition of proteins that somewhat uniquely identify both the manner in which the virus spreads and the core components of which it is formed.

While the rest of world’s population scatters themselves into self imposed quarantines resorting to social distancing and face masks to try to control something well beyond any one person’s own ability to control; I must pause the panic on a the note of a major component of the story that is being overlooked by many.

Wired early this week pointed out that doctors had scientifically isolated the genetic materials that directly link this swine flu to a previous outbreak that occured back in 1998 in the South US. This 1998 outbreak was limited in scope and quickly contained as it did not have the capability to spread pig to human (unlike H1N1). The root cause of the outbreak was at that time determined to be industrial agricultural pig compounds within the US and Mexico. Those corporate farming compounds used methods of animal production that are still in use today. Those methods center around high concentrations of stationary animals confined to stalls, forced fed, and in many instances poorly sanitized due to the scope and nature of the facilities’ capability to support such a large population of animals. In this instance, it was concluded the outbreak was caused by the pigs constant exposure to fecal matter and the overall sub-standard living conditions the pigs were confined within that literally became a Garden of Eden of sorts for the various viruses and bacteria that cause such outbreaks.

Now I’m not going down some liberal bleeding heart avenue here, but the parallel can be seen today where the first victim (aptly named “Patient Zero”) of H1N1 and every patient since then, have all had infections with trace genes that show this current virus is a direct descendant from the 1998 H3N2 swine influenza. That fact alone shows there is a real direct link between H3N2 and H1N1 that cannot be ignored. Notably, H3N2 also was capable of quick mutation and gene swapping with other strains of influenza in the host body’s blood stream. This remarkable capability stunned investigators at the time who expressed high concern that if left unattended this virus could reemerge within the decade even more mutated and less capable of isolation. Further H1N1 Patient Zero (a five year old boy) just happens to live down the road in a small Mexican village from several major pig farms owned by US corporations and operated in similar manners to the facilities described above.

The owners (Smithfield Foods Corporation) have denied any link and noted they have tested their flock, but regardless of whether the existing pigs have the flu or not one can only deduce how a mutated virus would make its way across an isolated region with no know previous H1N1 or H3N2 cases to the local populace via water, dirt, or just good old wind. Ultimately, that same local populace would spread it to the surrounding areas population who in turn would spread it to tourists and so forth.

Rolling Stone has an article on Smithfield Foods and how one they are one of the biggest polluters in the world. They describe how Smithfield runs their operations. Needless to say, you may not want to eat any ham or bacon before glancing over the article, but I do highly recommend it. The article is from December 2006 and again the warning signs are nothing short of shocking in retrospective.

Now I’m not saying every corporation is run like this or that we need to have some of wild witch hunt on industrial manufactures because I’ll also note that if we hadn’t driven these operations out of the US with excessive taxes that maybe we could have done a better job of regulating the  industry as whole.

What I am saying is that the world as a whole has to wake up and focus on how our daily activities impact those around us. While we may have not been able to prevent the flu (pigs will get the flu just like the rest of us) being more proactive on daily operations safety and awareness is nothing short of life saving. As an operations manager myself I’m at a loss to explain this, but I can only hope that going forward the meat production industry will try to address these concerns directly instead of pointing fingers and shrugging shoulders.

In a global nation there is no longer the ability to hide our garbage in somebody else’s backyard. Especially when that same backyard happens to also be one of the biggest tourist destinations in the world. That secret will quickly become one that is unable to be contained because after all– unlike Ops managers, viruses don’t take orders from CEOs and have a tendency to just do whatever the heck they want to.

Originally published at http://digitalflood.wordpress.com on 3/3/09