DES MOINES, Iowa — Like the virus itself, the name “swine flu” is spreading quickly. For the pork purveyors and hog farmers who make up the nation’s $15 billion pork industry, that’s a disaster.
It doesn’t seem to matter that the strain might not come entirely from pigs and cannot be spread by eating pork. Hog prices are already dropping as investors worry that people will have second thoughts about buying “the other white meat.”
“It’s killing our markets,” said Francis Gilmore, 72, who runs a 600-hog operation in Perry, outside Des Moines. He worries that the crisis might ruin his small business. “Where they got the name, I just don’t know.”
The European Union’s health commissioner has suggested the virus be renamed “novel flu.”
Others suggest that the virus be named based on the geography of the outbreak: “North American influenza.”
