DES MOINES, Iowa – Randy Schmidt runs a high-health hog breeding operation in Iowa and thought he was operating as safely as possible.
But after hearing veterinarian James Roth describe how an H1N1 strain could break into his herd through wild birds mixing with his children’s ducks and geese, he decided to tighten security.
“I’m probably going to go home and build a fence so the ducks don’t get through and get to the pigs,” said Schmidt.
That’s the kind of increased vigilance and disease prevention Roth was promoting during his session at the World Pork Expo.
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He wanted farmers to understand that it’s mainly up to them to determine whether H1N1 remains a human disease with no living connection to hogs and pork.
“Everybody’s able now to stand up and say there’s no evidence this is in pigs and there’s no evidence this is gone from pigs to people,” said Roth in an interview.
“If we do get evidence that it’s in pigs and it goes from pigs to people, we won’t be able to say that. We’ll have lost that argument. We really need to keep it out of pigs.”
The pall of H1N1 and its apparent devastating effect on the hog market hung over the recent World Pork Expo in Des Moines and had many producers despondent, angry and frightened.
Veterinary experts took different approaches to dealing with the issue. Scott Dee of the University of Minnesota wanted farmers to relax.
“Don’t worry about it. It’s a human disease and it’s behaving just like seasonal human influenza … I don’t think it’ll affect pigs. It affected the market because of all the misinformation and I think people are beginning to understand that pork is safe to eat.”
He said farmer speculation about the re-emergence of the disease in the autumn is harmful.
“I don’t think we need that type of thought process,” said Dee.
“I think we need to be optimistic and we’ll get through this like we do everything else and I get a little upset when I see all this speculation with really no data.”
But Roth, director of the Centre for Food Security and Public Health at Iowa State University, took the opposite tack. He wanted producers to realize there’s a significant danger of the disease and they need to deal with it now.
“It’s essential to prevent transmission from humans,” said Roth, noting that the 1918 influenza outbreak that killed approximately 50 million people emerged in the spring, appeared to die off, then came back in a more virulent form in the autumn.
If the disease spreads into pigs, there is a chance it will mix with other forms of influenza in the pig population, mutate, then spread back into humans in a dangerous new form.
