Feeling like I'm getting sick

According to this article in New Scientist, a swine flu epidemic has been predictable for some time:

We could have seen this coming, though. This type of virus emerged in the US in 1998 and has since become endemic on hog farms across North America. Equipped with a suite of pig, bird and human genes, it was also evolving rapidly....

Over decades, H1N1 evolved in pigs into a mild, purely swine flu, and became genetically fairly stable. In 1976, there was an outbreak of swine H1N1 in people at a military camp in New Jersey, with one death. The virus did not spread efficiently, though, and soon fizzled out.

But in 1998, says Richard Webby of St Jude's Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, swine H1N1 hybridised with human and bird viruses, resulting in "triple reassortants" that surfaced in Minnesota, Iowa and Texas....

It turns out that one in five pig farmers has antibodies to swine flu. That is, they've already been infected in the past.

And the CDC already warned last year that H1N1 swine flu represented a pandemic threat. Pigs aren't getting it because they're being vaccinated, but they can still spread it.

Another happy result of breeding animals for food.

Or at least an argument for Hebrew National kosher franks, for those of you inclined to eat meat anyway. (Note that I'm not endorsing chicken, turkey or beef, either.  And we can save the discussion about the myriad problems with raising "kosher" meat - see AgriProcessors - for another time.) 

Which brings up the request by Israeli deputy health minister Yakov Litzman that swine flu be called "Mexican flu" because references to pigs are not kosher or halal, so "swine flu" is accordingly offensive to Jews and Muslims. On the other hand, offending Mexicans? Eh, not so much of a concern for Mr. Litzman.

Eso es todo amigos.

(I'm not aware of a large segment of Jews that were offended that Mel Blanc, voice of Porky Pig, gave a voice to a swine, or had the words of a pig inscribed on his tombstone. But, in the world of Bill Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, Michael Medved, and others who claim to speak for us, you never know. Moreover, according to records that I could locate, Blanc didn't die from Swine Flu, despite a lifetime working with - or pretending to be - farm animals.)