Pig manure dumps could be pandemic ground zero

A series of manure dumps near a small Mexican village could be "ground zero" for the flu pandemic now threatening the world, it emerged today.

Reports have linked the outbreak to a series of waste lagoons in the Mexican town of La Gloria, in the Perote municipality of Veracruz State.

They are filled with manure and other waste material from a pig farm that raises almost a million animals a year.

Today it was claimed the first known case of swine flu emerged in the area a fortnight earlier than previously thought, in a village where residents have long complained about the smell and flies from the nearby pig farm.

The Mexican government said it initially thought the victim, Edgar Hernandez, four, was suffering from ordinary influenza, but testing has since shown that he had contracted swine flu. The boy went on to make a full recovery.

The facility, Granjas Carroll de Mexico, is partly owned by Smithfield Foods, a Virginia-based American company and the world's largest producer and processor of pork products. The "mega-farm", known in the agriculture business as confined animal feeding operations, is renowned for the clouds of flies drawn to its manure lagoons.

According to biosecurity monitoring firm Veratect, residents believe the outbreak has been caused by contamination from the pig-breeding farms in the area. They believe the farms polluted the atmosphere and local water, which in turn led to the crisis. It is also now known that there was a widespread outbreak of a powerful respiratory disease in the La Gloria area earlier this month, with some residents falling ill in February.

Health workers soon intervened, sealing off the town and spraying chemicals to kill the flies that were reportedly swarming through people's homes.

However, a spokeswoman for Smithfield said the firm had found no clinical signs or symptoms of the presence of swine influenza in its pigs or its employees working at its joint ventures anywhere in Mexico.

Mexico's National Organisation of Pig Production and Producers said in a statement: "We deny completely that the influenza virus affecting Mexico originated in pigs because it has been scientifically demonstrated that this is not possible."