Did the swine flu originate in the USA...?

At the risk of doing a post on something I barely understand, the swine flu or H1N1 does appear to have genetic roots in the good 'ole US.  Wired has the expose:

As Wired.com reported on Tuesday, geneticists studying the composition of viruses taken from swine flu victims described it as the product of a DNA swap between North American and Eurasian swine flu strains.

On Wednesday, Columbia University biomedical informaticist Raul Rabadan added new information on the virus' family history in a posting to ProMed, a public health mailing list. His description paralleled that of other researchers who had analyzed the new strains, but with an extra bit of detail. Six of the genes in swine flu looked to be descended from "H1N2 and H3N2 swine viruses isolated since 1998."

H3N2 -- the letters denote specific gene variants that code for replication-enhancing enzymes -- is the name of a hybrid first identified in North Carolina in 1998, the tail end of a decade which saw the state's hog production rise from two million to 10 million, even as the number of farms dropped. H3N2 originated in a relatively benign swine flu strain first identified in 1918, but had absorbed new genes from bird and human flus.

At the genetic level, the years that followed remain a mystery -- hog flus are poorly monitored, compared to human influenza. But eventually an H3N2 spawn merged with a strain of Eurasian pig flu, producing the swine flu variant that's now infecting humans.

Experts contacted by Wired.com agreed with Rabadan's analysis. For researchers who track the evolution of influenza viruses, the news was chilling.

The point here is that industiral pig farmers in America (and no doubt elsewhere) raise pigs in very unnatural and unhealty ways.

Industrial farms are super-incubators for viruses," said Bob Martin, former executive director of the Pew Commission on Industrial Animal Farm Production, and a long-time critic of the so-called "contained animal feeding operations."

At an environmental level, the conditions which shaped H3N2 and H1N2 evolution, and increased the variants' chances of taking a human-contagious form, are well understood. High-density animal production facilities came to dominate the U.S. pork industry during the late 20th century, and have been adopted around the world. Inside them, pigs are packed so tightly that they cannot turn, and literally stand in their own waste.

Diseases travel rapidly through such immunologically stressed populations, and travel with the animals as they are shuttled throughout the United States between birth and slaughter. That provides ample opportunity for strains to mingle and recombine. An ever-escalating array of industry-developed vaccines confer short-term protection, but at the expense of provoking flu to evolve in unpredictable ways.

As much as I am a consumer of mass produced meat, the more I know about large industrial food production, the more I want to grow and raise all I eat. 

In any event, if we want to prevent the next pandemic, we dont have to look to foreign shores to find changes that need to be made.  

In other words we reap what we sow.

Stay Tuned...