Food Safety Magazine, February/March 2013

Animal Welfareand Food SafetyBy F. Bailey Norwood, Ph.D., and Jayson L. Lusk, Ph.D.The 2011 movie Contagion tells a fictional story of how globalization and ease of travel canproduce fast-spreading pandemics, killing people more quickly than government authoritiescan respond. The culprit for this Hollywood illness is a new virus of unknown origin, resistant to allknown vaccines.It isn’t until the end of the movie that the origin of the killer is revealed. It all began (spoiler alert) with abat carrying a piece of banana to a hog farm. The bat manages to fly into an enclosed building wheresad-looking hogs are housed in tight quarters. The bat drops the banana on the floor, where itis quickly eaten by a hog. Presumably, the banana or the bat carried a virus, whichspread to the pigs. One of the pigs is thenslaughtered, and a man carving the meatin China fails to wash his hands before heshakes the hand of a character played by GwynethPaltrow, who then travels back to the UnitedStates where she dies—but not before sickeningmany others. 1The premise of Contagion is that raising hogs on “factory farms”encourages the emergence of deadly pathogens. How accurate is thiscaricature? In reality, a bat is more likely to drop food near hogs or chickensraised outdoors. Would the movie have been more realistic if the batinfected a pig raised on an organic farm, a farm where animals roamed “free46 F o o d S a f e t y M a g a z i n e