Origin of swine flu
A team from the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) is on its way to Mexico Tuesday April 28 with the purporse of investigating the origin of the swin flu cases in Mexico.
The BBC rumours that people had been falling ill last month near some intensive pig farms meant the FAO had to act: “[We had] no indication of human cases of direct contact with pigs but this can never be totally sure and the probability that this virus could come from pigs directly could not be anyway ruled out totally”
It is believed that the origin of the current pig flu epidemic took place in an industrialized American-Mexican where a 4-year-old boy acquired the illness first. The boy, who survived the influenza infection, is Mexico’s earliest known case of the pig-bird-human chimera virus, Health Secretary Jose Angel Cordova said Monday. The boy lives near a pig farm run by a U.S.-Mexican company, Granjas Carroll, in the municipality of Perote, in Veracruz State on the Gulf of Mexico. The 4-year old contracted the disease on April 2, Cordova said, one of a group of residents who came down with what was at the time labelled a particularly bad case of the flu. Testing confirmed that the disease contracted by the boy was due to the same strain of virus that has caused the epidemic.
People contracting pig flu from pig farming is not uncommon, in fact, it happens everywhere in the world; what is highly uncommon is that after the virus contracted from the animal is acquired it is transferred from human-to-human as is the case of the current epidemic.