What I Said, and Didn't, About Swine Flu and CAFOs

Tom Philpott, who blogs about the food industry's many ecological sins for the environmental news site Grist, took issue Wednesday with my examination of the overheated allegations against the pork industry in regards to the swine flu outbreak.

In his comments affixed to the article, Philpott operates from the assumption that I believe the media should ignore the issue of whether industrial hog operations should be investigated as a possible source of the H1N1 virus. This couldn't be further from the truth, and I didn't say anything of the kind. Indeed, I said just the opposite. All I'm asking is that bloggers and journalists be careful before drawing hard conclusions and making specific allegations against anyone—on this matter or any other. I know, that's a passé notion. I stand by it nonetheless.

Let me say up front that I think Grist and Philpott generally do an outstanding job. Grist's food section is among the first sources I look at every morning, and I often use Philpott's posts as grist for my own blog. The food industry needs as many watchdogs as possible, and Philpott is a fierce one. It also helps that his knowledge of the subject is both wide and deep.

That said, I (and others) think that Philpott and several other bloggers and columnists jumped to too many conclusions, too soon, on this issue. I think the questions certainly needed to be raised, and Philpott was just the person to raise them. But raising questions is different from drawing firm conclusions based on mere speculation, and indicting a specific company in the process.

As to Philpott's specific complaints, he writes that it was "just wrong" of me to say that his initial post was "based on nothing but speculation." But it was. In his complaint, he writes that he "pointed to Veratract [sic], whose report included this line: 'However, a municipal health official stated that preliminary investigations indicated that the disease vector was a type of fly that reproduces in pig waste and that the outbreak was linked to the pig farms.' "

I quoted that passage myself. The speculations of an unnamed "municipal health official," filtered through the Mexican media and then through the Veratect Biosurveillance blog are still speculations. Those speculations are fine to cite but not enough to conclude that Smithfield's operations were the source of the virus, as Biosurveillance blogger James Wilson took pains to point out.

Philpott also cites "the Mexico City newspaper La Jornada, which claimed that the Mexican health agency IMSS was looking into the Smithfield operations."

Also fine to report. But surely not enough to flatly conclude that Smithfield was to blame, as was done in the original headline on Philpott's post: "Swine-flu outbreak linked to Smithfield factory farms." (That headline was later changed to read "... could be linked ...")

Philpott also writes in his comment: "So, let me get this straight. The responsible reaction in the U.S. media to this information is ... silence?"

I didn't say that. The responsible reaction is responsible reporting. Or, if you're simply raising the question, the responsible thing to do is to point out very clearly that the origin of the disease hasn't been determined and to clearly state that Smithfield might be wholly innocent in the matter.

And while I agree that the media in general haven't (yet) given enough attention to CAFOs as potential disease vectors—in this case and in general—they also haven't ignored them entirely.

As for Smithfield's claim that it has no responsibility, I'm not judging it at all, but merely reporting it—in the context of the company's history of fouling the environment and the usual corporate doublespeak and ass-covering. In the absence of hard independent evidence, I don't lend any more (or less) credence to the company's claims than I do to the unsupported speculations of bloggers.

Philpott writes in his comment that "evidence has been building" that "the current flu strain emerged from factory U.S. hog farms in the late 1990s."

That's true. There is some evidence of that—enough to demand that it be followed up on, by both the media and by government agencies. But evidence is not proof. And more importantly, even if "factory U.S. hog farms" are to blame for orginating the virus a decade ago (which seems quite possible), that doesn't say anything about Smithfield's Mexican operations today.

If it turns out that Smithfield's CAFO was the origin point of the virus, I won't be in the least surprised. I'll be even less surprised if some other CAFO, in the United States or elsewhere, bred this disease amid its horrid, unregulated, fecal muck. But we just don't know yet, and we shouldn't pretend that we do.

Really, all that needed to be done here—by Philpott, by the British papers that glommed on to the theory, by Democracy Now! (which is about as fair and balanced as Fox News), and by everyone else—was to go ahead and raise these questions, but to also make sure to clearly label speculations as speculations.