I don’t have much to say about Swine Flu except that everyone should relax. Here are the facts on cases and deaths:

Mexico: 101 suspected deaths - 16 confirmed
US: One death, 160 confirmed cases
New Zealand: 4 confirmed, 12 probable cases
Canada: 35 confirmed cases
UK, Spain: 15 confirmed cases
Germany: 4 confirmed cases
France, Israel, Costa Rica: 2 confirmed cases
Netherlands, Switzerland, Austria, Denmark, Hong Kong, South Korea, Italy: 1 confirmed case

If you’ve ever had the flu before, you know that you feel crummy for two days. You puke and you drink a bunch of water. Then you’re fine. From what I understand, this is really no different.

Egypt went ahead and killed 300,000 pigs as a precaution despite the fact that you can’t get swine flu from eating pork.

There is one issue that should be obvious: Factory Farming and industrial meat production.

Swine flu. Bird flu. Mad cow disease. SARS. These diseases have all spread from animals to humans in one form or another. But animals aren’t to blame for outbreaks of animal-borne diseases — humans are.

Our demand for meat means pigs, turkeys, chickens, cows and other animals must be mass produced in crowded, feces-ridden factory farms like the one in Mexico that is suspected of starting the current swine flu outbreak. These farms are incubators for disease.

Pork producers and other U.S. officials are calling for a name change, saying “swine” flu is hurting their businesses.

U.S. pork producers are finding that the name of the virus spreading from Mexico is affecting their business, prompting U.S. officials to argue for changing the name from swine flu.

At a news briefing, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack took pains to repeatedly refer to the flu as the “H1N1 virus.”

Bullshit, it’s already swine flu and the public isn’t going to change it now. If we are going to change the name, lets call it what it is: Factory Farm Flu. We can even call it “F-Squared” as long as people know that the origin of these illnesses do not come from Mexico and they do not come from pigs or other animals; they are created in the conditions of industrial meat production.

Lets take all the hysteria and all the energy geared toward this virus and direct it toward the real underlying problems.