The Mexican swine flu, which scared the jeebers out of millions of people, doesn’t seem so scary after all. It’s starting to look like your run-of-the-mill flu. It got off to a nasty start in Mexico, but that may be because a lot of people there avoid or have trouble getting to a doctor. There’s still a lot of folk medicine going on in those little villages. So, the American supermarkets and drug stores may soon be able to restock their shelves with anti-microbial hand lotion and face masks. As a sidebar, this reminds me of the run on duct tape a few years ago, after the government released a report about how to survive if a terrorist releases radiation or deadly germs near your home. (I.e., the report said to tape big sheets of plastic around your windows and doors.)

There’s another little side-bar going on in the liberal blogosphere right now about the pig farm in Mexico where the current swine flu might have originated. (I can’t say whether this side-issue is also happening on in the twitter-osphere; the attention spans there are probably too short for it.) Some reporters and Mexican officials are tracing the new flu to a village named La Gloria, which is near an industrial food production farm run by Smithfield Foods – yes, an American corporation that produces and sells pork. Actually, Smithfield Foods is the largest pork producer in the world. Smithfield denies that their pigs were involved, saying that they are clean — none of them showed any signs of having the latest flu strain. Of course, you’ve got to wonder just how thoroughly they looked and tested; and whether the local health officials were willing to risk angering the gringo outfit that probably comprises 90% of the local job market and economy.

Personally, I don’t seek to blame Smithfield Foods alone for the flu; they’re probably running their pig farms like most any other industrial pig farm, no better and no worse. Who I do blame is us, we Americans who can’t think outside the box about our diets. I am a former meat-eater who became a vegetarian about 15 years ago, and over time I’ve seen more and more evidence of the stress that meat consumption places upon the world. Meat consumption today is big business, a product of international corporations which grow, process and serve most of the meat eaten in America and in other developed nations. The stress from it includes poorer health in old age and the resulting burden on medical resources (reflected in soaring health care and Medicare costs); and increased energy use (fuels needed for growing animals, transporting them and refrigerating them) and the global warming greenhouse gases they produce. It’s a bit harder to get fat on a balanced vegetarian diet; and grains, beans and veggies certainly use less fuel and have a smaller “carbon footprint” per calorie consumed. And now, it’s starting to look as though ham and bacon and spare ribs encourage the development of super-bugs that could take down a whole lot of people.

Why is this? Modern pig farms, like any other kind of industrial food-animal facility, try to maximize their efficiency by jamming animals as close together as possible. Also, pigs have genetic DNA structures that in certain ways are closer to human genetic structures than with most other animals (hmm, what does that say about us???). A whole bunch of pigs jammed together, tended by low-paid human workers who may not have such good sanitary habits, become a central hub for infectious diseases that could affect humans. They present a lot of opportunity for viruses to do what they do naturally — i.e., mutate, change their own genetic codes a bit. So you have all these pigs exchanging germs with humans and each other, each pig incubating millions and millions of different types of germs. This gives these germs new chances to develop even more variations, which affect their ease of transmission and what they can do to you once they reach you. Most of these virus variations are failures; they die off quickly. But every so often, by luck of the draw, a new combination occurs that can spread easily and can do some real damage to humans.

If you had a pig in the forest who developed this new super-bug, it probably wouldn’t get far. But a pig jammed together with hundreds or thousands of other pigs will almost assuredly spread it to the other pigs, who in turn will then spread it to the humans who tend them (or who live near-by in villages like La Gloria, possibly by insects). Oh, and another thing — pigs crammed together in farms also interact with birds, and we know that birds are also pretty good at developing flu viruses that can affect humans. The pig farms can’t keep birds from landing near their pigs (or roosting in their living areas) and depositing their droppings so that pigs can breath or ingest the more successful avian germs strains. Well, that’s another head-start that these pigs get in developing germs that can really knock human beings for a loop.

It’s kind of like having a house with a door that opens with a six-digit code number. Every day you punch in six numbers on the door panel, and if use the right code, it lets you in. You set the code number, which can be any number from 000000 to 999999; i.e., there are one million possible number combinations. Let’s say that there’s a bad guy in the neighborhood who wants to get into your home and rob everything and then kill you during the night. The house is pretty secure, and the only way the robber can get in is to punch in the right code number. Let’s also say that the robber only gets one chance each night to punch in one number; he doesn’t know the number, so he guesses. And he’s very persistent; he keeps coming back each night, trying another number.

If we assume that he has no idea about what number you would use, nor whether you would use some kind of pattern (like 212121) or just select a number randomly (like 598830, perhaps), then on average it will take him 500,000 nights to come up with the right code. Let’s see, that’s 1,369 years. I’m not a good math guy, but you could also come up with probability bands, e.g. something like a 90% chance that it will take him at least 100 years, etc. (Not sure of the exact number, but it would be something like that). Obviously, there’s only a one-in-a-million chance that he will finally break in and kill you on any given night. So you decide, OK, I can live with that.

But let’s say that things change, so that the robber can try out a whole lot of numbers every night; then his chances get better and better. And let’s say that he also gets some info about you, on what kind of number you might select. Based on your past decisions, he knows that you are likely to use a subtle pattern in the numbers, e.g. 791827 (the second, fourth and sixth number are in descending order). Say that the bad guy figures out what that pattern is, and is smart enough to use it to narrow down the list of possible numbers. Now this robber is a whole lot more dangerous. That’s the difference between a thousand pigs wandering around in a forest, occasionally being hunted and eaten by a human, and a thousand pigs jammed together in an industrial factory-farm in a third-world country. Viruses have a much better chance with such a pig farm of finding the right code to “break in and rob the human house”. The odds are being stacked in their favor.

So perhaps we got off light this time. The birds, pigs and people in Mexico have cooked up (thru the enhanced trial-and-error process going on at pig factories such as Smithfield Foods) another new virus, which has some “legs”. It has the right “code” to spread around in people; but it doesn’t have the punch to do more-than-average damage. In reality, humans are like a house with more than one door and door code; the robber (virus) might figure out the code to get in thru the outside door, but might not get the code to the master bedroom where you sleep. Thus you won’t be killed. BUT, with pig farms giving these “robbers” more and more chances and more head-starts regarding information structures (from the viruses they exchange with humans and birds), sooner or later a really deadly virus will emerge.

That’s the trade off for those delicious spare ribs at Chili’s or that affordable Easter ham from the local supermarket or that bacon / ham McMuffin at Mickey D’s. Don’t blame us vegetarians when the big avian-pig-human virus finally does come knocking at your door.