One flu over the piggy's sty...

I had a quick panic on Monday when I started snivelling and coughing - I've got a toddler and a pregnant woman in the house and didn't want to kill either. I'm always surprised at how irrational I can get when something affects me - and at how hard it is to find a thermometer when you really need one. And like the 'cocktail effect' you get with certain combinations of pesticides, the more frustrated I got with the errant device, the more convinced I was that something really bad was going to happen.

But anyway, I found the bloody thing and I now know I've got a bad head cold rather than a mild flu with a scary name. Calm.

Two thoughts are uppermost in my mind:

1. How dare the press accuse the medical establishment of not handling the panic well when it is the press creating the panic. As we speak the Guardian website is both predicting it will peak in the next couple of weeks and cause bedlam in Fresher's week. OK, the official advice for pregnant women is crap too - plan your pregnancy carefully, but don't put off conception. What?

2. Ever since the flu took off (pun not intended) in this country, we've stopped discussing why it came about in the first place - bad animal husbandry on a grand scale in third world countries to meet the demand for dirt cheap food in the first world. Prevention better than a cure and all that? Factory farming is messing with nature and when you mess with nature...

Pigs, Productivity & Pitchforks

One of the godfathers of the permaculture/organic farming movement, Masanobu Fukuoka, once said:

"If we throw mother nature out the window, she comes back in the door with a pitchfork."

We've had the first confirmed case of swine flu in our town, Newcastle upon Tyne, someone who'd recently visited Mexico. She's OK and so are his flatmates, and the infection numbers in Mexico are stabilising, but with a pregnant woman and a toddler in the house, it is hard not to worry a little bit.

And why has it happened? We create an industrial style of agriculture where disease flourishes without intervention, then export it to poor countries where costs are low and standards are lower (the two obviously relate) and on top of that we misuse antibiotics to promote growth further. And what happens?

It's another case of where our "success" in raising our standard of living in the West is coming back to bite us (cf climate change, AIDS, drought). Commentators in the press may sneer at the organic movement and say "it's OK for those who can afford it", but the question is, can we afford not to do it?

And, of course, once again, it is the poorest who have been hit hardest.