Do you really think slaughtering pigs in Egypt will prevent swine flu from entering through the airport in a man's lung?
Warning! This post is very old and may contain information or opinions that are no longer valid or embarrassing.
Killing 300,000 thousand innocent Egyptian pigs to prevent the swine flu from jeopardising our health is the most gruesome act of unjustifiable killing of animals I will ever witness.
The swine influenza type A (H1N1) is now a human transmissible virus of swine origin i.e. it spreads from a sick person to another healthy one through coughing and sneezing. Although, it originated from pigs in Mexico and infected humans the role of pigs in the spread of infection now is minimal, specifically non-infected pigs in Egypt.
I am not a specialist in matters of public health and how infections spread. But there are stuff that if you thought about for a second or two will really makes sense.
Swine flu will enter Egypt through its borders and not from pigs. The funds that will go in compensating farmers can be better directed to improve the appalling sanitation of the pig farms and the conditions of their farmers not to the eradication of a local variety of an entire specie.
This virus is susceptible to two types of anti-viral treatments, which is a great thing to start with. This means that if the medicine is available and cases are diagnosed early on. We can minimise the fatalities.
The decisions to kill huge amounts of birds in south east Asia during the early outbreak of the birds flu was justified by the fact that the disease was spreading between birds, birds can fly and thus spread it quickly across the globe and the disease spread from birds to humans and not human to human as the swine flu. Killing birds and other attempts to control bird flu was of limited success.
I am not also sure that there is a standard procedure that will ensure that pigs die in a merciful way nor a procedure to deal with the tons of corpses that will result. Which in itself might spread other diseases.
A pig is like a cat, rabbit or cow. And a decision like this, although popular, is unethical and violates the animal's rights. Not to mention, that lots of sectarian zeal is behind this.
I wonder if there will ever be an ethical committee in the Parliament one day to stop stupid decisions like that.
UPDATE: I found this article that quotes a UN Food and Agriculture Officer regarding the killing of pigs:
Joseph Domenech, chief veterinary office with the UN Food and Agriculture Officer in Rome, said the Egyptian order was "a real mistake".
"There is no reason to do that. It’s not a swine influenza, it’s a human influenza,” he said.
Comments
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tom
350 000 dead hogs will start to rot in about 12 hours. Coloria sets in in another 12 hours. Birds feeding on those dead hogs will carry the Coloria all over the area. Also being down wind from the roting dead hogs will carry the germ to humans.
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zb
the average cost of a pork is 4USD per pound and domestic pigs have an average weight of 150-200 pounds. if you do a simple math, it would be 300,000 x 175 x 4 = 210,000,000 million USD. oooowwww! for any sensible mind leading a country like egypt, wasting this amount of money on a silly and wrong reason is utterly unacceptable. plus what about the people who have their livelihoods on raising pigs? their dreams, aspirations and hopes are not counted in the cost. it doesn't take a genius to figure out other factors behind the decision. it seems that there is some sectarian stuff going around this issue. a sad story!
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Sutures
Hope that, as humans are often exposed to forms of H1N1 through seasonal flu, our immune systems may have something of a head start in fighting infection.
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interpreter
I think that slaughtering pigs may have been good at the outset, but now that the virus has jumped to humans and is spreading rapidly, it won't help.
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M
I thought the killing of the egypt pigs was the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard...glad we didnt kill our pigs here in the u.s. we are not that stupid!!
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Swine Flu
LOL this is so true and a good article.
I don't think there's a greater health risk right now like the h1n1 swine flu virus, the government isn't telling us everything about this pandemic. It will kill thousands more this fall/winter.
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tom
Egypt is tradeing a few swine flu cases for massive Colora outbrake
moftasa
You might want to explain more.