Pork Industry Hurting After Mexican Flu (Swine Flu) Outbreak

The World Health Organization (WHO) confirmed Wednesday that it is looking into alternative names for the swine flu virus, with one alternative being the Mexican flu. The reason for a change in name would because of the negative impact that the “swine flu” name has had on the pork industry despite there being no cause for concern for those that consume pork products.

As more and more cases of the swine flu have appeared worries about eating pork have risen so high that some countries have banned pork imports from the United States and Mexico. Pork sales are also already dropping in the United States and Wall Street is now predicting a large drop in pork sales and consumption in the United States. In fact some retailers have seen upper single digit drops in pork sales within the past several weeks.

The problem with this is that people do not realize that there is no way to contract the swine flu from eating pork. You can only contract swine from another human being or pig that has the rare human to human or pig to human mutated strain of the swine virus.

As you can guess the pork industry has reacted strongly against this virus being called the swine flu. There argument was that even though it originated in pigs the name “swine flu” gives the general public the perception that pork is the problem when instead the real issue is influenza. Nobody within the pork industry is denying the fact that the swine flu passed through pigs and mutated to a human to human strain but they are upset about the false perceptions that have been created. The pork industry continues to point out that health and medical officials have stated repeatedly that pork, when cooked properly, has absolutely no chance of spreading the swine flu.

Despite reassurance from health officials regarding the safety of eating pork some countries have reacted strongly by banning or limiting pork or all meat imports. In the Philippines, Ukraine, Ecuador, and Kazakhstan the governments have already put a complete ban on U.S. pork important. China has, in a similar move, banned pork from certain states and in the most extreme case Russia has banned all meat imports.

American officials have said that once the swine flu spread to America they expected bans to be put in place. Often times countries will impose bans in order to help limit consumer panic or as an excuse to create a trade barrier of some sort. The pork industry is very upset over these pork bans and believes that the decisions are purely politically based and have nothing to do with health related issues.

I myself find the confusion about pork to be quite disturbing and the ban by governments as a political move in causing the confusion to be worse. One woman who use to buy pork but has since stopped was quoted by the New York Times as saying. “People in Mexico ate some pork and got sick, right?” This statement is completely false, per the CDC and WHO explanations and is not something to be worried about. I myself am not a health expert myself but tend to believe that the government probably knows what they are talking about here.