The other day, a friend of mine asked me about the possibility of a link between swine flu and CAFO's. I'd seen some buzz around the sustainability and organic corners of the internet and forwarded a post by Tom Philpott in Grist, Swine Flu Outbreak Could be Linked to Smithfield Farms but with the huge caveat that I didn't see any real evidence that lead to his speculations. I told her that was the reason I hadn't posted any of that stuff on ImpCo, because I didn't see anything other than finger-pointing without evidence. Now the Columbia Journalism Review has posted a nice little summary of the action on the Swine Flu/CAFO front for any of you who want to look at the vacuum of information, the tiny little bits of evidence and the discussion in the mainstream medium over the possibility of a connection between swine flu and huge pig operations, Swine Flu and CAFO's?
Clearly, it is too early to make bold pronouncements about CAFOs’ role in abetting the epidemic that has now spread to seven countries. As a front-page article in The New York Times on Wednesday pointed out, even “La Gloria may not, in the end, be the source of anything.” And Yulsman, who originally chided the press for ignoring factory farms, wrote a follow-up postdecision to slaughter all of the country’s 300,000 pigs despite no confirmed cases there, or an article in criticizing CNN’s Headline News for hyping the threat they pose. Many worry that jumping to conclusions can lead to panic or incite unnecessary and costly control measures. (Take, for example, Egypt’s The Washington Post about the threat to the global economy.)
That said, now is the perfect time for journalists to begin investigating CAFOs in a responsible fashion. That means doing things a little differently than the early blog posts, which tended to have a finger-pointing tone, did not deliver much context about evidence and controlling for alternative hypotheses, and did not call experts to test their theories.


