Statistics Hog-Tie Pig Farming to H1N1 Cases

By Alex Roslin

August 27, 2009

The Georgia Straight

[Click here for the story at the Straight website]

As hospitals brace for the coming flu season and a possible new surge of H1N1 cases, international data on the flu pandemic shows it has hit Canada worse than almost any other country.

And a close look at the data suggests that a key factor may be something that health authorities have largely overlooked: hog farming.

Canada had the sixth-highest number of H1N1 cases per capita and the fifth-highest per capita rate of H1N1 deaths of all 134 countries and dependencies that had reported flu cases to the World Health Organization as of July 6. (That’s the last date for reliable international comparisons, because the WHO advised countries in early July to stop reporting data on individual H1N1 cases.)

Canada’s H1N1 rate was almost 15 times the global average—23.7 lab-confirmed cases per 100,000 people, compared to an international average of 1.6 cases per 100,000, according to the WHO data. Canada’s per capita rate was double that of the U.S. and 2.5 times that of Mexico, where the pandemic is thought to have started.

Canada’s H1N1 death rate was 10 times the international average: 7.4 deaths per 10 million people, versus 0.7 globally.

It’s not clear why Canadian H1N1 rates are so high. One possibility is that Canadian medical authorities have simply sent more cases to labs for testing. But the data also suggests another possible factor: Canada’s high concentration of hog farms.

It just so happens that Canada has the world’s eighth-highest number of pigs per capita—almost 15 million pigs, or about one for every two Canadians. And an analysis of international flu data shows that H1N1 rates have strong correlations with hog farming.

In Mexico, where it probably all started, there was a moderate, statistically significant 46-percent correlation between confirmed per capita H1N1 cases in all of the country’s 32 states and its federal district and the number of pigs per capita in those states. That’s according to the data as of July 2, the date the Pan American Health Organization stopped publishing the breakdown of flu cases within countries of the Americas.

(Correlation measures the strength of the relationship between two groups of data. A correlation of 30 to 50 percent is generally considered to be moderate, 50 to 70 percent is strong, while 70 percent or higher is very strong.)

Yucatán was the Mexican state with the highest rate of H1N1 cases per capita: 92 per 100,000 people. It’s also one of the country’s hog-farming hubs, with the most pigs per capita of any state, more than one for every two people.

Argentina had the world’s highest per capita death rate from H1N1, with 15 deaths per 10 million people, or 20 times the world average of 0.7 deaths. In Argentina’s 24 provinces and its capital district, there was a 70-percent correlation between the per capita death rate and the ratio of pigs to people.

The Argentinean province that had the highest death rate was Santa Fe, with 130 H1N1 deaths per 10 million people. Santa Fe also happens to have Argentina’s highest ratio of pigs to people.

And those countries aren’t the only ones where there’s apparently a relationship between the pandemic and hog farming. Among the 39 countries and dependencies in the Americas that had reported H1N1 cases as of July 6, there was a 51-percent correlation between H1N1 cases per capita and the number of pigs per capita.

Globally, the 20 countries with the most pigs per capita had a per-capita H1N1 rate of 5.5 per 100,000—more than 3.3 times the international average of 1.6 cases. As well, their per capita death rate from H1N1 was 2.5 per 10 million, or more than triple the international average of 0.7.

“This is a very serious concern,” said Bob Martin, who headed the Washington, D.C.–based Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production, when told about the Georgia Straight’s data analysis. “It’s just another step in showing what serious impacts these large-scale swine operations can have.”

Martin’s commission released a study last year that said workers in large farms, and their neighbours, have high rates of asthma and other respiratory illnesses due to manure runoff and emissions like ammonia and fine-particle pollution. Respiratory illness makes people more vulnerable to H1N1, he said.

A high portion of H1N1 hospitalizations and deaths have occurred among people with an additional medical condition like asthma or a compromised immune system.

In an initial story in July, the Straight reported that strong correlations exist between per capita H1N1 rates and the number of pigs per person within B.C.’s five health regions and in each of Canada’s provinces.

As of July 8, Manitoba, the country’s hog-farming capital, with 2.4 pigs per person, had three times as many H1N1 hospitalizations per capita as the Canadian average and 3.7 times as many deaths per capita.

The international data puts the high Manitoba numbers into even starker perspective. Manitoba’s per-capita H1N1 rate, 65 per 100,000 people, was 40 times higher the international average and far worse than that of the country with the highest rate in the world, Chile, which had 44 cases per 100,000.

Manitoba’s death rate—41 per 10 million people—was 60 times the global average and nearly three times that of Argentina, the worst-hit country in the world in terms of deaths.

So far, Canadian public-health officials have said the flu pandemic is spreading mostly randomly, though they acknowledge it has hit some vulnerable populations harder, especially those with respiratory problems, aboriginal people, and pregnant women. Most scientists believe H1N1 originated on a huge Mexican factory pig farm, then spread between people around the world.

In Canadian aboriginal communities, H1N1 is thought to be worse because of poor health care and overcrowding. Indeed, the data confirms that Native people have been hit harder and need extra resources to deal with H1N1. The per capita number of H1N1 cases in each province had a very strong 87-percent correlation with the per capita number of aboriginal people.

That’s even higher than the 77-percent correlation between per capita H1N1 cases and the per capita number of pigs in the 10 provinces.

However, when it comes to more serious H1N1 cases that involved hospitalization and death, the correlations were stronger for hog farming. There was a 44-percent correlation between per capita H1N1 hospitalization rates and the number of aboriginal people per capita in each province, compared to a 72-percent correlation between hospitalization rates and the per capita number of pigs in each province.

H1N1 deaths per capita had an 82-percent correlation with the percentage of aboriginal people in each province, but had an even stronger 89-percent correlation with the number of pigs per capita.

“I hope the World Health Organization will start looking at the same data you’re looking at,” the Pew Commission’s Martin said in a phone interview.

The Corruption Factor

Ramazan Bashardost (right), a former Afghan planning minister and law professor, quit the cabinet of Afghan president Hamid Karzai citing widespread corruption and is running for president in the Aug. 20 election. Beside him is Scott Taylor, publisher of Canadian defense magazine Esprit de Corps. Photo by Sasha Uzunov.

Canada is quiet amid growing reports of government corruption in Afghanistan, which votes Thursday

Alex Roslin

Saturday, August 15, 2009

The Montreal Gazette

The man they call the Ralph Nader of Afghanistan couldn’t have a more humble office or home. Ramazan Bashardost, a popular Kabul MP, is running his campaign for the Afghan presidency out of a small tent where he lives opposite the country’s parliament.

While many other candidates travel in convoys with squads of bodyguards and are said to be systematically bribing voters, Bashardost has a modest election budget of $20,000 and only a smattering of campaign posters up around Kabul.

Yet a poll released yesterday ahead of Afghanistan’s election, which takes place Thursday, puts Bashardost in third place with 10 per cent of the vote—a potential spoiler position and enough to possibly cost president Hamid Karzai, the front-runner, an outright majority and force a run-off poll. Abdullah Abdullah, Karzai’s former foreign minister, is in second place—polling at 26 per cent to Karzai’s 44 per cent.

Bashardost—a former Afghan planning minister who quit Karzai’s cabinet citing widespread corruption—condemns the Karzai regime as hopelessly sleazy. During a phone interview this week, he said he has a special message for Canadians: “It’s time for Canadian taxpayers to say, ‘Enough. We won’t give our tax dollars to people who steal money.’”

Bashardost’s message is increasingly resonating with Afghans and Western officials irked at Karzai’s inclusion of several prominent warlords and drug traffickers in his re-election campaign.

The U.S. administration of President Barack Obama has distanced itself from Karzai in recent months. U.S. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton called Afghanistan a “narco state” during her confirmation hearing in January.

Obama rebuffed the Afghan leader’s request for a bilateral visit this spring, and put an end to the friendly bi-weekly videoconference chats Karzai had enjoyed with president George W. Bush, the Washington Post reported in May.

“Karzai is not our man in this upcoming election,” said a U.S. official quoted in the story.

In contrast, Canadian officials have refused to take Karzai to task publicly about corruption. Asked in June about Karzai’s choice of a well-known warlord as a vice-presidential candidate, International Trade Minister Stockwell Day, who chairs the cabinet committee on Afghanistan, said there is a “reluctance” to say “anything about a particular candidate.”

“There are times when we will look at certain candidates who are running and we will say, if I was involved in that election, if I was running against that candidate, I’d be making his or her past history very clear,” Day told a House of Commons committee.

“But we have made a commitment that we’re not going to interject ourselves into the election process.”

These concerns centre around corruption related to Afghanistan’s flourishing opium trade, which now feeds 90 percent of the world’s supply and was worth an estimated $3.4 billion last year, or a third of the country’s gross domestic product, according to UN figures.

About $70 million U.S. of that revenue flows to the Taliban insurgency, mostly through taxation of opium farmers and shipments, according to CIA and U.S. Defense Department estimates.

U.S. military officials recently responded to this flow of revenue by placing 50 Afghans suspected of being traffickers who fund the Taliban on a target list to be captured or killed, according to a New York Times report this week.

But the bulk of the opium revenues go not to the Taliban, but to Afghan warlords and corrupt political figures who are allied with the West, says Jorrit Kamminga, director of policy research at the London-based International Council on Security and Development, a think tank that focuses on Afghanistan.

“Opium is a third of the Afghan economy. It means everybody is involved either directly or indirectly. It’s really everywhere. You could argue it’s a narco-state,” he said.

When the Taliban were ousted from power in 2001, their ban on opium growing went with them. One of the most conspicuous manifestations of opium’s prominent role is the Kabul neighbourhood of Sherpur, the country’s wealthiest enclave. An empty hillside as recently as 2001, Sherpur now boasts extravagant mansions that Afghans have dubbed “poppy palaces” and “narcotecture.”

Some of the most candid public criticism of Karzai has come from the former U.S. ambassador for counternarcotics in Afghanistan, Thomas Schweich. In an article in The New York Times Magazine last year, Schweich said he initially believed Karzai’s strong anti-drug statements when he arrived in Kabul in 2006, but that soon changed.

“Over the next two years I would discover how deeply the Afghan government was involved in protecting the opium trade,” he wrote. “Karzai was playing us like a fiddle: The U.S. would spend billions of dollars on infrastructure improvement; the U.S. and its allies would fight the Taliban; Karzai’s friends could get rich off the drug trade; he could blame the West for his problems.”

***

Thomas Ruttig, a former UN diplomat now working as co-director of the Afghanistan Analysts Network, said Western nations are also to blame for the drug-fuelled corruption.

“The West has to be partly blamed. Many of our Afghan allies are involved in the drug trade. We are effectively turning a blind eye,” he said in an interview from his Kabul office.

The corruption is now so rife, he said, it is pushing angry Afghans to support the Taliban.

“One of the major reasons people turn away from the government is what I would call bad governance, including corruption. It has created a lot of disillusionment,” he said.

The anger is also being turned against Canadian soldiers, who are increasingly seen as “bullyboys of a corrupt regime,” said Scott Taylor, publisher of Ottawa-based defense magazine Esprit de Corps.

Taylor has reported extensively from Afghanistan and interviewed some of its most infamous warlords.

“We are turning a willful blind eye (to the corruption). We have de facto become what the Soviets were—trying to prop up a hated regime,” he said.

Speaking by phone from his tent in Kabul, Bashardost agreed. “The Afghan state is in the process of destroying itself—without a need for the Taliban to use any force.

“When people go before a judge, they are asked for bribes. People say it is better to resolve their problems through (judicial councils organized by) the Taliban or tribal leaders.”

A case in point, he said, is Kandahar, the province that is home to Canada’s 2,800-troop mission. Kandahar, a major Taliban bastion, has seen opium cultivation shoot up fourfold since 2003, while corruption has also become widespread.

A sign of how bad things are came in 2008 when UN inspectors headed out to audit the Afghan government’s opium-eradication efforts in Kandahar. They found 72 percent of the crops that were supposed to have been destroyed were actually still standing.

It was one of the lowest rates of any province in the country, according to a 2008 UN report. Local officials often take bribes from farmers in order not to destroy crops.

Ruttig and Kamminga both advocate a radical solution they say would undermine the opium traffickers and warlords and eliminate much of the corruption—buying the opium crop directly from farmers and destroying it. Alternatively, Kamminga says, the opium could also be sold to drug companies to turn into medicine such as morphone.

***

Today, Kandahar’s highest-profile politician is Karzai’s half-brother, Ahmed Wali, who is the head of the provincial council and is widely suspected of links to drug trafficking.

A 2006 Newsweek investigation reported that well-placed sources said Karzai’s brother was a “major figure” in the opium trade; one Afghan Interior Ministry official said he “leads the whole trafficking structure” in the country’s south.

“There were numerous diplomatic reports that (Karzai’s) brother Ahmed Wali, who was running half of Kandahar, was involved in the drug trade,” Schweich wrote in his piece last year.

U.S. officials have directly challenged Karzai about evidence of his brother’s drug ties in several meetings since 2006, according to reports in the Washington Post and New York Times. The Afghan president reportedly dismissed the allegations, citing lack of proof. (Karzai’s brother also denies the claims; he has never been charged with drug involvement.)

Canada’s Defense Department didn’t respond to a request for comment for this story. A Foreign Affairs spokeswoman said none of the three department officials authorized to grant media interviews on the Afghan election was available to comment.

Taylor said the allegations about Ahmed Wali are widely known among Canadian officials, but they are loath to rock the boat. “If we are going to start stirring things up with Ahmed Wali Karzai, we are going to have trouble with Hamid Karzai,” he said.

“Our primary mission is to stay alive, so we basically want to anger as few people as possible.”

But that policy is backfiring, said Bashardost, because it fuels the Taliban insurgents who are killing Canadian soldiers.

“I’m sorry to say Western powers are wasting their money and (soldiers’) lives in Afghanistan,” he said.

Bashardost, a French-educated former law professor, shot to prominence as planning minister in 2005 when he produced a report that said 80 per cent of the 2,400 non-governmental organizations involved in foreign-aid projects in Afghanistan were corrupt.

He recommended the expulsion of all the corrupt NGOs, but lost Karzai’s support and ended up resigning. He then set up his tent outside parliament and ran for office, winning the third-highest number of votes out of 400 parliamentary candidates.

Bashardost says Canada can take some simple steps to help Afghanistan: Cut ties with corrupt Afghan officials and investigate how hundreds of millions of dollars in Canadian development aid to Afghanistan are being spent.

“The Canadian government must absolutely demand that it won’t spend one dollar or give one (soldier’s) life if the Afghan government is full of warlords, corrupt people, drug traffickers and war criminals,” he said.

“Your soldiers and money are very useful—on condition that the regime is clean, which is not the case right now.”

TAGS: Afghanistan, drugs, opium, corruption

Pigs Possibly Linked to H1N1 Flu Cases in B.C.

By Alex Roslin

Thursday, July 16, 2009

The Georgia Straight

[Read story at the Straight website]

Remember when they called it “swine flu”? The first pandemic flu in 41 years was quickly renamed “H1N1” in its early days after the pig industry, in damage-control mode, proclaimed loudly that people couldn’t get sick from eating pork. And they said that it looked like the flu was spreading worldwide from person to person—not from pigs to people.

More than two months after the initial outbreak, it’s still not clear how the flu started. The most accepted explanation is that a farm worker at a massive swine operation in Mexico got the virus from a pig and carried it into the wider population, where it spread without any more involvement from pigs.

But a closer look at the data on H1N1 cases in B.C. and the rest of Canada suggests the pandemic has a much closer relationship with pig farming than suspected. That relationship is especially striking in the most serious cases of the flu that have caused hospitalization and death.

The Fraser Health Authority, the district with the largest number of pigs in the province—and one of the most intensively farmed areas in Canada—has a 39-percent-higher rate of confirmed H1N1 cases per capita (9.7 per 100,000 people) than the provincial average (7.0 per 100,000), according to data from the B.C. Centre for Disease Control as of July 6. B.C.’s first confirmed death from H1N1 flu occurred on July 13 in the region.

The rate is even higher in the Northern Health Authority, which has the highest ratio of pigs to people in the province. The northern region has a 48-percent-higher per capita H1N1 rate (10.3 per 100,000) than the B.C. average.

The data shows a near-perfect 93-percent correlation between the number of pigs in a health region and the number of confirmed H1N1 cases there. (Correlation measures the strength of the relationship between two groups of data. A correlation of 70 percent or higher is generally considered to be strong.)

Density of pigs also seems to have a relationship with H1N1 rates—especially when it comes to the most recent flu cases. There is a 95-percent correlation between new cases of H1N1 confirmed during the week of June 29 and the number of pigs per farm in a particular region.

The same high correlations exist Canada-wide, according to Statistics Canada figures on pig farms and an analysis of data on confirmed H1N1 cases from the Public Health Agency of Canada as of July 8. The data shows that the flu has been more severe in areas with intensive, large-scale hog production.

The total number of confirmed H1N1 cases in each province has a 99-percent correlation with the number of pig farms in that province.

In Quebec, the province with the highest number of pigs—4.3 million—residents were twice as likely to be hospitalized when they acquired H1N1 as the Canadian average. Quebec’s death rate from H1N1 per capita has been 60 percent higher than the national average.

The flu outbreak has been even more severe in Manitoba, which has 2.4 pigs per person, more than any other province. There, the number of H1N1 hospitalizations per capita is triple the national average. The rate of H1N1 deaths per capita in Manitoba has been more than 3.7 times higher than the Canadian average.

The high correlations surprised even long-time critics of intensive, large-scale farming. “Wow, that’s astounding,” said Peter Fricker, projects and communications director for the Vancouver Humane Society.

“If there is a possible link between pig farms and susceptibility to disease, public-health authorities should definitely be investigating. If the correlations are correct, the whole issue of factory farming has to be looked at,” he said in a phone interview.

“Wow, really. I don’t think anybody’s looked at this before,” said Bob Martin, who headed the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production, which released a major study last year that said workers in large farms and their neighbours have high rates of asthma and other respiratory illnesses due to manure runoff and emissions like ammonia and fine-particle pollution.

Martin, speaking from Washington, D.C., said some people living near pig farms could be more susceptible to H1N1 and to more severe reactions because of such respiratory ailments.

As of mid-June, 40 percent of the people who had died of H1N1 in the U.S. had had an additional medical condition like asthma, diabetes, a compromised immune system, or heart disease, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control.

Dr. David Patrick, director of epidemiology at the B.C. Centre for Disease Control, said the data could mean people living in hog-producing regions have a higher predisposition to catching H1N1. But he cautioned that there could be other, unknown explanations for the high correlations, too.

“The fact that particulates can predispose people to asthma is clear. If particulates are an issue, we have to gradually improve our environment,” he said.

“If we have issues of predisposition [to catching H1N1], that’s a question for sober inquiry by people in environmental health.”

Until now, he said, public-health officials have believed H1N1 spreads randomly between people or may cluster in areas with dense human populations.

“Probably the most important message is if people with flu symptoms have asthma or chronic lung disease or anything that affects their immune system, see a doctor right away because antivirals can help avoid hospitalization,” he said.

The B.C. Pork Producers Association didn’t return a call for comment.

In the province’s agricultural heartland, the Fraser Valley, H1N1 seems to be going strong instead of dying off after the end of the usual flu season, as initially predicted. So far, the vast majority of incidents have been mild, but a flurry of 22 new H1N1 cases there was confirmed during the week of June 29. That number was the highest in any region of the province and almost twice as many per capita as the provincial average.

The high numbers coincide with a trend of relatively high incidence of recent H1N1 cases in some of the biggest hog-producing provinces. During the week after July 3, Manitoba saw the highest rate of new confirmed H1N1 cases per capita in Canada (8.4 per 100,000)—5.6 times more than the Canadian average (1.5 per 100,000).

The location of new flu cases also seems to have a close relationship with especially high concentrations of pig farming. There is an 80-percent correlation between the number of new cases in the seven days after July 3 and a province’s ratio of pigs to people. In other words, the more pigs there are per person, the higher the rate of the flu.

And no region of Canada has a higher density of farm animals by weight than the Fraser Valley, according to Hans Schreier, a soil scientist and professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia who has studied agricultural pollution in the Valley.

“We’re generating so much manure in these operations, it winds up in the soil and water,” he said in a phone interview.

Thanks in large part to massive amounts of farm waste pouring into the Fraser River watershed, the Georgia Basin is “perhaps the most threatened area in the country” for coastal eutrophication—a process that stimulates algae blooms and chokes marine life—according to a study Schreier coauthored in 2006 in the journal Biogeochemistry. The study said farm-waste discharge is poorly regulated across Canada.

An Agriculture Canada report in 2002 found factory pig farms were causing health and pollution risks to farm workers and the local community. “In B.C.’s Fraser Valley, this chemical soup [from farm emissions] is so thick it causes a visible haze and can make up 70 per cent of the airborne particles in summer,” said the report, which was quoted in a 2002 Ottawa Citizen story and was obtained under an access-to-information request.

And of all the farm animals in the region, pigs are by far the single biggest source of smog-causing fine-particle pollution, contributing 64 percent of the total fine-particulate matter from all farm-animal sources in the Fraser Valley Regional District, according to a 2004 study done for the district and Environment Canada.

That study noted that while air-quality improvement in the region had focused on reducing emissions from vehicles and industry, “emissions from agricultural operations have been relatively untouched.”

Meanwhile, levels of nitrogen—another big emission from farms—in ground water in the Central Fraser have been above the allowable limit for drinking water since 1981, according to a 1997 UBC study published in the journal Environmental Management.

George Peary, the mayor of Abbotsford, shares his community with the highest number of pigs of any agricultural district in the province—75,570, according to the 2006 census. He acknowledged that manure from pig farms has seeped into ground water in some areas and made some well water undrinkable, but he defended farming practices. “I wouldn’t tie it [H1N1] to agricultural operations,” he said in a phone interview.

“If there were an issue, the public-health people would keep me informed.…There would be all sorts of bells and whistles going off.”

A top health official also dismissed the higher H1N1 rates in his region and said they’re not worthy of further investigation or action. “It just doesn’t matter. It spreads from person to person.…We’re not looking at it from that perspective,” said Dr. Roland Guasparini, chief medical health officer with the Fraser Health Authority.

In recent years, the B.C. government has encouraged hog producers to spread far north to the fertile Peace River region, where there’s more available farmland. The policy has helped turn Peace River into the fastest-growing hog-producing region in the entire country, with a threefold expansion in pig numbers between 2001 and 2006. The region is now home to 24,000 pigs, more than double the human population of Dawson Creek, the region’s administrative centre.

And it just so happens that the Northern Health Authority, which includes the Peace River area, has the highest ratio of pigs to people in the province—and the highest rate of confirmed H1N1 flu cases per capita.

Just across the nearby Alberta border, Denis Sauvageau has all kinds of experience with pig farms moving in next door. He is a fourth-generation farmer in a tiny community called Falher.

On April 28, Canada’s first death related to H1N1 occurred at the High Prairie Health Complex, a 50-minute drive east from Sauvageau’s house. The woman had had asthma-related difficulties, though there’s no evidence they were related to farming emissions.

Sauvageau still recalls vividly how hog producers first came to town in the late 1990s with a slick promotion campaign promising a miracle of rural revitalization. “They would create jobs, keep schools open, keep our children here,” he said.

Today, the smell from a complex of large pig farms five kilometres away is often so strong, Sauvageau can’t stay outside. “The stench is gut-wrenching. It makes you want to puke. You’re done for the night.”

Sauvageau and his neighbours started a protest group, the Peace River Environmental Society, six years ago to demand improvements in farm waste management practices. They held demonstrations. The group estimated that the 50,000 swine in nearby farms produce 20 million gallons of manure per year.

Especially worrisome, he said, are the health problems in nearby areas—high rates of asthma and other respiratory illnesses.

The group finally convinced a reluctant province to study air quality in the area. “Odours do extend into surrounding areas at levels that may disrupt quality of life,” a draft version of the province’s report said in 2007. “The subgroup agreed by consensus that odour from CFOs [confined feeding operations] can have health effects.”

(The report was never published because the committee writing it, dominated by government and industry officials, couldn’t reach agreement on the document; Sauvageau’s group posted the draft on its Web site.)

The report cited other studies that had found ammonia from farms can reach levels in the surrounding area that can cause eye and throat irritation, respiratory problems, haze, and fine-particle pollution. Farm emissions of hydrogen sulphide, an eye and respiratory-tract irritant and neurotoxin at high doses, can “cause significant quality-of-human-life concern at the local scale”, according to a 2003 U.S. National Research Council study cited in the report.

The Alberta report also cited international research that found pig-farm workers have rates of chronic bronchitis that are 2.5 to 5 times higher than those in the wider population and 50- to 100-percent higher than those in dairy and poultry workers.

The possible connection between intensive hog operations and H1N1 means governments should tighten rules on farm waste, according to the humane society’s Peter Fricker. “They’re like small cities, except with no sewer system. You could understand why there would be a risk to human health.”

The Pew Commission’s Bob Martin agreed: “We have reached the point that we have to decentralize this production. It’s really a critical kind of issue.”

With 22 new flu cases confirmed just on July 13 and 14—two-thirds in the Fraser—maybe we’ll be calling it “swine flu” again soon.

H1N1 Flu Not Linked to Cattle Farms

Canada-wide, the death rate in confirmed H1N1 cases per capita in each province has an 88-percent correlation with the number of pigs per farm in that province (the bigger the pig farms, the higher the death rate) and an 89-percent correlation with the ratio of pigs to people in the province.

Also worrisome are trends among new cases. The number of new confirmed cases since July 3 in each province has a 97-percent correlation with the number of pigs in the province.

H1N1 rates have a much weaker relationship with poultry and cattle farming. Although a small correlation exists with H1N1 in some cases, especially with poultry operations, it is, on balance, more than twice as high for pig farms. In B.C., H1N1 rates actually tend to have a negative correlation with cattle farming (meaning the more cattle or dairy farms, the fewer flu cases there generally are in a region).

The Pill Pushers

Pharmaceutical giants employ "detailers" who specialize in persuading physicians to prescribe their companies' drugs

By Alex Roslin

September 4, 2008

The Georgia Straight

[This story won the Canadian Association of Journalists award for best investigative journalism in a magazine and was a finalist for the investigative journalism prize of the National Magazine Awards for 2008.]

When Shahram Ahari went to work at pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly straight out of college in New Jersey, he was hired to do a job that few people know exists. Even the job title would be a mystery to most people. Ahari was going to be a “detailer”.

His job was to schmooze with doctors in order to get them to prescribe Lilly’s drugs. He was really a salesman, but he was also much more. His tools included everything from free drugs to offers of lucrative speaking engagements, even trips. He’d bring medical residents pizza for lunch or invite a doctor to dinner at an exclusive restaurant. He’d do anything to improve sales in his New York City district, which meant a bigger bonus.

The first hint of the strange world Ahari had entered came when he was brought to Indianapolis for Lilly’s intensive, six-week boot camp for detailers. There, he met his fellow trainees. They were hundreds of fellow college grads, mostly in their mid-20s, perhaps two-thirds of them women, the vast majority beautiful.

“They were 200 or 300 of the most attractive people I had ever seen,” he said in a phone interview. “The physical appeal was only part of it. They were vivacious, well-coiffured, well-dressed, engaging people.”

Ahari soon learned that charisma was more important in his new job than, say, medical or scientific knowledge. He was the only one in his class of 22 trainees with a science degree, he said.

The training was part CIA, part Freud. He learned to immediately spot items in a doctor’s office that could be used to strike up a personal conversation and, ultimately, friendship: golf paraphernalia, photos of trips or kids, religious items. The information would later be entered into the company’s file on the doctor and analyzed for future approaches.

“It was analogous to training in spy agencies,” said Ahari, who ended up working for Lilly for a year and a half in New York City. “You instantly suss up the person’s personality and look for points of entry. You capitalize on sexual appeal. My more attractive colleagues would say, ‘I’m going to wear my short skirt today,’ or ‘I’m going to wear my low-cleavage top. He [the doctor] seems to get a kick out of that.’ ”

The practice of detailing has come under growing scrutiny in B.C. Two-thirds of doctors in the province say drug reps visit them at least once a month, according to a 2006 survey by the B.C. Medical Association. Forty-two percent of general practitioners are visited several times a week. ...

Read the rest of the story at The Georgia Straight's website here. Also surf to these follow-up stories: "Pharmacies sell prescription info to drug makers" and "B.C. Health Minister won't prevent gifts going to doctors."