The Hunt for the New Ground Zero

La Gloria, Chignahuapan, Mexico

From the first reports, the outbreak was termed "swine flu," until policymakers began to receive complaints from pork producers. Presently, the official name of the level 5 epidemic is the "H1N1 virus" while the rest of the story continues to unfold in several places around the globe. In Atlanta, at the headquarters of the Centers for Disease Control, researchers are tasked to determine the virulence of the disease. Staff there also respond to incoming questions from public officials, health caregivers and the public and their ranks include other U.S. government agencies responsible for worldwide public safety and the health of their own employees.

A newmedia reporter named César Chagoya uncovered a large and purportedly contaminated hog farm named Granjas Caroll near the village of La Gloria in southwest Mexico, where young Edgar Hernandez contracted the H1N1 strain.



video courtesy of the ASSOCIATED PRESS

While young Edgar Hernandez recovered, an additional 800 residents of La Gloria also contracted a mysterious flu just down the road from the object of Chagoya's investigation. Granjas Caroll is principally owned by U.S. based Smithfield Foods, one of America's largest supplier of pork products. The Granjas Caroll operation yields 950,000 hogs per year as reported on the company's website.

What Chagoya found upon visiting the mexican hog farm were deplorable conditions involving rampant filth and contamination resulting in hogs "unfit from excessive force feeding and drinking from a water source that contained their own blood and excrement." As the Associated Press video describes, the company countered a season of public complaint by claiming that since none of their hogs had been diagnosed with porcine flu, they couldn't be the source of any contamination or infection. Officials cite their technological advances as a reason why they couldn't be culpable for any public health concerns, including a "bio-digester" (where whole, rotting carcasses are disposed) that the company claims generates electricity for their plant. Raising pigs may be a dirty business by nature, but what Chagoya documented was contamination of the foulest kind, including photographs of the collecting ponds used for the massive herd's drinking water.

Backtracking the information, Chagoya discovered that Smithfield Foods had been the respondent in legal actions stemming from contaminated operations in Virginia. The people of La Gloria and others like Chagoya are asking questions about coincidence in disease and contamination and they say the two are linked. While it is true that people cannot be infected by eating pork or pork products, a mutating viral strain that genetically leaps from swine to people is of major concern to medical authorities, especially if it becomes a deadly mutation.

Health investigators are presently splitting their focus on both California and Mexico, saying that some children in California were identified with the N1H1 virus in March, several weeks before Edgar Hernandez fell ill in early April. But if a March increase in pneumonia (which can be caused by an influenza virus like H1N1) in and around La Gloria is found to be linked to the virus, Mexico's efforts to contain the outbreak, and the concern of La Gloria about their porcine neighbors, may prove to be even more important.

The CDC describes the real danger potential of the H1N1 virus as a future hybrid arriving after the first outbreak has been endured in the northern hemisphere. That scenario makes the murderous 1918 flu look like a foreshadowing of grave proportions, and the world awaits with baited breath.