In a Mexican Village With Swine Flu, Complaints About a Hog Farm Persist

While public health officials are still trying to determine where the outbreak of the swine flu started, there has been a lot of speculation online this week about a possible, though as yet unsubstantiated, link to an industrial hog farm in Veracruz, Mexico.

As my colleague in Mexico, Marc Lacey, reported on Wednesday, “state health authorities looking for the initial source of the outbreak,” toured the “million-pig hog farm in Perote, in Veracruz State.” Mr. Lacey explained:

The plant is half-owned by Smithfield Foods, an American company and the world’s largest pork producer. Mexico’s first known swine flu case, which was later confirmed, was from Perote, according to Health Minister José ángel Córdova. The case involved a 5-year-old boy who recovered.

That 5-year-old boy, édgar Hernández, lives in the village of La Gloria in Veracruz, which is close to the hog farm in Perote. After Mexican authorities identified édgar as the first person in Mexico to have become infected with the new strain of H1N1 influenza, or swine flu, representatives of many of the world’s major media organizations visited édgar in La Gloria.

As Mr. Lacey explained after his own trip to meet édgar on Tuesday:

In La Gloria, a town that has a major pig farming industry, two children died of the flu in March and early April, though the authorities said they had yet to determine whether it was the same strain that infected édgar and spread widely to other locales. That and other questions have left residents here unnerved and confused.

So far only édgar is the only one La Gloria who has tested positive for the 2009 H1N1 strain. Earlier this week, we noted that reports in two Mexican newspapers, La Jornada and La Marcha, had pointed the finger of blame at the hog farm near La Gloria, although the plant’s owners claim that none of their pigs, or workers, have tested positive for the flu.

On Friday, Sarah Smith of Britain’s Channel 4 News filed a blog post about her visit to the village. Ms. Smith’s post includes a video report (embedded below) in which a resident of La Gloria expressed his concern about the flu and took her to see a pit outside the hog farm in which piles of rotting pig carcasses are kept.