Pork producers fight flu fear factor

ST. PAUL, Minn. -- Juliet said to Romeo, "What's in a name? That which we call a rose. By any other name would smell as sweet."

Shakespeare clearly did not set that scene on a pig farm in the midst of an international "swine flu" outbreak, where names do matter and labels can hurt.

Pork producers are taking a hit this week based on fear, myths and misinformation about a disease that is not what the nickname implies.

"The futures market for pork it's been down pretty hard this week," David Preisler of the Minnesota Pork Producers Association told KARE Thursday, "In fact it's lost 15 to 20 percent of its value now from when we started Monday to today."

Those markets determine the prices farmers get for their pigs, and in Minnesota pork's a $7 billion industry which produces 15 million head of hogs per year, employs 22,000 people and creates a huge market for the corn and soybeans used as feed.

"This virus in this form is a human-to-human illness," Preisler remarked, "The way that you would catch it you would catch it from another human."

The pork industry launched a major public relations effort in hopes of getting the media to move away from the "swine flu" label, and to get consumers to put aside unwarranted phobia.

"You can cook pork, handle pork, eat pork," he said, "You can not get this flu or any flu from handling or consuming pork."

Preisler is encouraged by the fact the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control and the Minnesota Department of Health all formally opted for the name "influenza A (H1N1)" or "H1N1" for short.

The "H" and the "N" stand for the genetic markers hemagglutinin and neuraminidase, which are always found in the new strain of virus first detected in Mexico, but now officially confirmed in 11 different nations across the globe.

It's not that pigs don't catch the flu from other pigs. And the flu they get is typically called "swine flu" by producers.

"They can get an influenza virus that is called the swine flu," University of Minnesota animal sciences graduate student Jenna Pomerenke told KARE, "But that is not related to what we're seeing in humans right now."

Pomerenke gave KARE's crew a tour of the Swine Research and Teaching Building at the U's agricultural campus in Saint Paul Thursday, where several sows were nursing piglets in a sealed containment room.

She grew up on a hog farm in southwest Minnesota and was pressed into service as a "pork ambassador" for several days during last year's Minnesota State Fair.

"Pigs are healthy," she said, "And I can go out and eat a pork chop tonight and I would still be healthy because there is no pork to human passage of this disease."

It's actually more difficult to get a news camera into a commercial hog operation than one might expect, due to what is known as "biosecurity" measures, a set of practices designed to isolate pigs from contact with birds, rodents and humans.

"We do that to protect them basically from us," Preisler explained, pointing out humans can carry diseases from one herd to another.

In other words, pigs have more to fear from people at this point than we do from them.

By John Croman, KARE 11 News

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