Despite modern advances in microbiology, today's health officials still make decisions in a "cloud of uncertainty," Pennington says. "At the moment, our understanding of the current outbreak is similarly limited. For example, we don't yet understand why people are dying in Mexico but not elsewhere".

Now, I am not saying that those cases are the same as today's, but it seems as though panic and pandemonium are the order of the day immediately something happens.
Take for example the recent outbreak of swine flu that caused widespread fear, so much so that Egypt has ordered the slaughter of the country's 300,000 pigs, even though no cases have been reported there . The fact is, the current epidemic is little more than an accident of evolution. If pigs are to blame, so too are birds and humans.

Birds are the natural reservoirs of the common flu strains and those strains tend to hit humans particularly hard. But while humans are not susceptible to every strain of avian flu, pigs definitely are, through no fault of theirs.
Generally, avian flu viruses infect birds, and human viruses infect humans. The problem arises when there is an intermediary that can host both avian and human viruses, such as a pig.
That's what makes pigs such a powerful medium for the flu virus. Although the bird-pig-human route is less common than the straight forward bird to human hop, it can be more of a problem.
Strains of avian flu (bird flu), like the H5N1, can infect individual humans, but they can't be passed from person to person.

However, the virus of the so called "Swine flu" is formed when avian, swine, and human-like viruses are combined in a pig to make a new virus. After mutating, "it is then able to be spread by respiratory droplets and infect humans, it can now spread between humans by sneezing and coughing",said Perez, program director of the University of Maryland-based Prevention and Control of Avian Influenza Coordinated Agricultural Project, AICAP.

This makes the flu virus a tenacious foe from the outset, but once humans intervene ecosystem,we made a bad situation much worse. Scientists, farm families and people working in live markets then began mingling and upsetting the ecological balance. All at once, chickens, ducks and pigs (which never had much to do with each other), began living like peas in a pod in high numbers and often unsanitary conditions. We feed our cows (herbivores) artificial feed mixed with other animal parts thus mutating them into carnivores hence "Mad cows". We pumped up our young chickens with growth hormones to make them weigh in at ten pounds six weeks before thanksgiving and call them "roasters". We modify or try to enhance the growth of everything we consume. Then mother nature fights back and we panick and start blaming the animals and other nations.
Mexico Health Secretary Jose Angel Cordova said it's wrong to call it "North American flu" and flatly rejects the idea of calling it "Mexican flu." He pointed to WHO information that the swine genes in the virus are from Europe and Asia. Rabadan and others say four of the six pure swine genetic markers are North American".

The pathogenic speed blender kicks in, and the viruses have taken full advantage of it.
Viruses are not Dumb. They just sit there and wait for us to screw up, as we are so wont to do.
This type of virus like other types of mutated organisms (which are light years ahead of all homosapiens) will bypass any immune system that is already in place. Thus sending scientists crawling back to the drawing board.

"Calling this swine flu, when to date there has been no connection between animals and humans, has the potential to cause confusion," Chris Novak, chief executive officer of the National Pork Board, said in a news release.

"We have no idea where it came from," said Michael Shaw, associate director for laboratory science for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
"Everybody's calling it swine flu, but the better term is 'swine-like.' It's like viruses we have seen in pigs, it's not something we know was in pigs."

I for one will never stop eating swine. I love it
There are plane crashes and car accidents everyday and I never stop flying or driving, so why should I stop eating pork?

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