Sue Sturgis, Institute for Southern Studies, 5 May 2009
Writing about swine flu last week, we observed that massive hog farms like those clustered near the outbreak’s epicenter in the Mexican state of Veracruz “can act as a vector for environmental injustice,” and pointed to studies done in North Carolina — the nation’s second-biggest producer of hogs after Iowa — that found such farms put nearby residents at risk of serious health problems and tend to be concentrated in communities with high poverty rates and a high percentage of racial minorities.
As it turns out, there’s a more direct connection between the current swine flu outbreak and North Carolina: Scientists working to understand the genetic makeup of the H1N1 virus that causes the disease have linked it to a virus behind a 1998 swine flu outbreak at an industrial hog farm in Sampson County, North Carolina’s leading hog producer.