Health issues only matter if you are a person? When did health become species specific?
THIS IS NOT VP JOE BIDEN'S FAULT! This is the fault of a 24 hour news cycle that drums a story into our heads none stop, and a Corporate media that refuses to notice tons and tons of pig shit no matter how bad it smells.
Smithfield Foods actually faces a more difficult task than transmogrifying the populations of America's thirty-two largest cities into edible packages of meat. Hogs produce three times more excrement than human beings do. The 500,000 pigs at a single Smithfield subsidiary in Utah generate more fecal matter each year than the 1.5 million inhabitants of Manhattan. The best estimates put Smithfield's total waste discharge at 26 million tons a year. That would fill four Yankee Stadiums. Even when divided among the many small pig production units that surround the company's slaughterhouses, that is not a containable amount.
- Rolling Stone
In 1997 Smithfield was fined the largest amount ever by the EPA for helth violations related to dumping waste into Virginia watersheds. That was over 12 years ago.
more of this pigshit below the fold.
We can no longer ignore the fact that our consumption of meat poses a major health risk to us as individuals and as a society itself.
We have to face the fact that how we raise and farm our food has a profound impact on the health of our environment and our population. To ignore this on a nutritional level is foolishness. To ignore this on a biological level is outright madness.
What we need from organizations like the WHO and institutions like our media and our political establishment are answers, not fear mongering and charts. When 110+ people in 11 states in a nation of 300 million creates the cause to panic it is a sure sign that the media is ducking the main issue, which is that health issues are health issues no matter what species you are. When 250+ cases of swine flu break world wide it should NOT ne an all day every day news story. It should be a reminder to wash your hands before every meal and to cover your mouth when you sneeze.
This is not rocket science or medical biology. It is common sense. If you needed the POTUS or the WHO to tell you that, you are an idiot.
I don't want to question the intent of the WHO (World Health Organization), nor do I care for conspiracy theory. What I care about is the fact that we are being fed another color coded terror pathogen alert chart instead of telling us what caused this and how do we fix it now. When it comes to health issues, how does the WHO possibly ignore the fact that animal health issues ARE human health issues?
The fear mongering perpetrated by our media, political leaders and other institutions is a disgrace. A serious and severe as this potential pandemic may or may not be, the way that the public is being scared into a reaction serves no purpose, other than to distrat from the real issue at hand, which is that we can not continue to practice unsustainable factory farming techniques and protect the world's health at the same time. Corporate factory farming poses a health risk to everyone, livestock and human.
Hat tip to josh nelson who wrote a diary titled The Swine Flu Story American Corporate Media is Ignoring that was featured on the DKos rec list a few days ago. If you have not read it yet, I would suggest that you do so.
The Rolling Stone article from 2006 that Josh quoted in his diary is an absolute MUST read. The quote above the fold came from this article, which was written by Jeff Tietz and was titled Boss Hog. Here is the first paragraph.
America's top pork producer churns out a sea of waste that has destroyed rivers, killed millions of fish and generated one of the largest fines in EPA history. Welcome to the dark side of the other white meat.
~snip~
Smithfield's pigs live by the hundreds or thousands in warehouse-like barns, in rows of wall-to-wall pens. Sows are artificially inseminated and fed and delivered of their piglets in cages so small they cannot turn around. Forty fully grown 250-pound male hogs often occupy a pen the size of a tiny apartment. They trample each other to death. There is no sunlight, straw, fresh air or earth. The floors are slatted to allow excrement to fall into a catchment pit under the pens, but many things besides excrement can wind up in the pits: afterbirths, piglets accidentally crushed by their mothers, old batteries, broken bottles of insecticide, antibiotic syringes, stillborn pigs -- anything small enough to fit through the foot-wide pipes that drain the pits. The pipes remain closed until enough sewage accumulates in the pits to create good expulsion pressure; then the pipes are opened and everything bursts out into a large holding pond.
Those holding ponds often leak and seep into the ground where it affects local water supplies. Even when this is not the case, 4 yankee stadiums full of highly toxic pig shit is a health hazard for the entire population living near these facilities. How could this possibly be ignored?
I'm sure money has nothing to do with it. Nothing at all.
That top pork producer was Smithfield.
Hot sweltering pig pens stacked in a huge warehouse have become a human health issue. To deny this is to ignore the entire heart of the problem.
Instead, we get this.
Under Our Products at the Smithfield website.
Legendary Hams from Smithfield, there's just nothing on earth like them. Period.
The EPA thought the same thing. There really is no shit like this on earth.
One of the largest pork companies on the East Coast was fined $12.6 million - the largest water pollution fine ever- for dumping hog waste into a Chesapeake Bay tributary.
U.S. District Judge Rebecca B. Smith ruled Aug. 8 that Smithfield Foods Inc. was liable for nearly 7,000 violations of the Clean Water Act since 1991. She said she wanted at least a portion of the fine to be used for Chesapeake Bay restoration efforts. The ruling resulted from an EPA lawsuit that accused Smithfield of polluting the Pagan River and destroying documents to cover it up.
BayJournal.com September 1997
Almost 7000 violations? What did they do?
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, Plaintiff, v. SMITHFIELD FOODS, INC., SMITHFIELD PACKING COMPANY, INC., and GWALTNEY OF SMITHFIELD, LTD., Defendants.
Rebecca Beach Smith, UNITED STATES DISTRICT JUDGE
Based on the credible testimony and evidence, most of defendants' violations were severe. . . . On average, defendants exceeded the phosphorus limits by 1,055%, fecal coliform limits by 1,365%, ammonia limits by 97%, cyanide limits by 168%, oil and grease limit by 114%, and the TSS limit by 63.5%. The only exceedances that were slightly above the limits were TKN discharges, which exceeded the limits by 35%, and chlorine discharges, which exceeded the limits by 8%. Thus, defendants' effluent violations were frequent and severe.
law.buffalo.edu
Smithfield seems to be giving Monsanto a run for it's money in the Most Evil Corporation of America award.
Of course, Monsanto is letting this one get away without a fight. This series of 5 videos is available on YouTube, and it is a must watch
for anyone who cares what happens to our food before it hits our tables.
I am guessing that what we do genetically to our food has some impact to the diseases that mutate and evolve in order to strike a balance with it's hosts. Whether those hosts are swine, human or both is besides the point.
The bigger issue, IMHO, is that we as a society can no longer continue factory farming the way we have been in the past. Smiithfield received these fines for their plants in Virginia. I can not imagine that the rules in Mexico are any stricter than the rules we have in the US.
If we stopped eating as much meat (chicken, beef, pork, etc . . . ) we could solve several health, environmental and hunger issues at once. Of course, that will mean the Meat Industry will lose money, and making Corporations spend money on health and environmental issues is the last thing that the WHO or the WTO are interested in.
That is what we should really be scared of.