Tom Philpott, writing for Grist, reports that the outbreak of this dangerous new swine flu appears to have come from a factory farm in Vera Cruz, Mexico, run by Smithfield Foods, the "world's largest pork packer and hog producer." According to the article, the farm is run by a Smithfield Mexican subsidiary called Granjas Carrol, and that the facility produced more than 960,000 pigs last year.

As a former managing editor of a farm magazine, I can say with certainty that there is nothing sustainable about a single facility that raises that many pigs each year. I saw the emergence of confinement swine facilities in this country that sprang up in the Seventies. The sight of so many living creatures of great intelligence bunched together in appalling circumstances persuaded me to become a vegetarian. I can only imagine the practices in countries where laws are even less stringent than ours.

But now we are learning that such practices are not only bad for the pigs, but bad for us, too. Or at least we would be learning this if the U.S. media bothered to report it.