FRONT PAGE: "Germ Sleuths Stalk Origin of Killer Flu," by David Luhnow, Jose de Cordoba and Betsy McKay, Wall Street Journal, 1 May 2009.INTERNATIONAL: "Pork Industry Fights Misbeliefs as Trade Bans Arise and Shoppers Grow Wary," by Andrew Martin and Clifford Krauss, New York Times, 29 April 2009.
FULL-PAGE AD: "Let's keep pork--and all the facts--on the table," FactsAboutPork.com, USA Today, 6 May 2009.
More and more it seems incorrect and thus unfair to pretend this thing begins solely in Mexico.
Interesting map on the jump page of the first story: shows how one vector of the flu jumps from North America to UK, Netherlands, Switzerland, New Zealand and Israel (all either Core or Core-like and stuck in the Gap, in Israel's case).
Point: it travels fastest by jet and air travel comes most frequently among advanced economies.
Meanwhile, our pork industry suffers like our beef one did with mad cow a few years back, likely to suffer overseas market losses that may never be made up in full.
Unfortunate tendency of naming the flu according to the animal group in which it originated, because pork meat has nothing to do with this current crisis.
But as with any System Perturbation, that truth doesn't stop irrational or purposeful isolation techniques, like banning pork imports to help your local farmers or to punish some ethnic minority you like repressing. Opportunists abound in any System Perturbation.
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