Could the next pandemic start at the county fair?

It was show time at the youth pig show, and the barn was bustling. The contestants, ages 3 to 21, practiced their walks for the show ring and brushed the hog hair into place. Parents braided the children's hair, adding ribbons and pig-shaped barrettes.
Dr. Andrew Bowman, a molecular epidemiologist at Ohio State University, walked through the barn in waterproof green overalls, looking for hog snot. As he slipped into a pen, a pig tried to get out of his nose, then started nibbling his shoelaces.
Dr. Bowman prefers not to enter the enclosures, he said, as he wiped gauze on the animal's nose. He quickly spotted a more appealing subject: a pig sticking its nose out from between the bars of its enclosure. “We have a total bias for muzzles,” he said. Later, back in the lab, Dr. Bowman and his colleagues will discover that several of the sniffling snouts around this bustling New Lexington, Ohio barn were harboring the flu.
The world is emerging from a pandemic that has killed at least 6.9 million people. It won't be the last. Outbreaks of zoonotic diseases, which can spread between animals and humans, have become more frequent in recent decades, and animal pathogens will continue to spread through human populations in the years to come. To Americans, spillover may seem like a distant problem, a danger that inhabits places like the live animal market in Wuhan, China, which may have been the root of the Covid-19 pandemic.
"I think there's this real sense here in the United States that the disease is something that comes from somewhere else," said Ann Linder, associate director of the law and policy program animal at Harvard Law School.
But there's a real risk in our own backyards — and our backyards. Since 2011, there have been more confirmed human cases of swine flu in the United States than anywhere else in the world. (That may be because other countries are doing less testing and surveillance, and many cases here and abroad are likely to go undetected, experts say.) Most have been linked to agricultural shows and fairs. "They've become kind of hotspots," Linder said.
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Health Jul 25, 2023 0 36 Add to Reading List

Could the next pandemic start at the county fair?

It was show time at the youth pig show, and the barn was bustling. The contestants, ages 3 to 21, practiced their walks for the show ring and brushed the hog hair into place. Parents braided the children's hair, adding ribbons and pig-shaped barrettes.

Dr. Andrew Bowman, a molecular epidemiologist at Ohio State University, walked through the barn in waterproof green overalls, looking for hog snot. As he slipped into a pen, a pig tried to get out of his nose, then started nibbling his shoelaces.

Dr. Bowman prefers not to enter the enclosures, he said, as he wiped gauze on the animal's nose. He quickly spotted a more appealing subject: a pig sticking its nose out from between the bars of its enclosure. “We have a total bias for muzzles,” he said. Later, back in the lab, Dr. Bowman and his colleagues will discover that several of the sniffling snouts around this bustling New Lexington, Ohio barn were harboring the flu.

The world is emerging from a pandemic that has killed at least 6.9 million people. It won't be the last. Outbreaks of zoonotic diseases, which can spread between animals and humans, have become more frequent in recent decades, and animal pathogens will continue to spread through human populations in the years to come. To Americans, spillover may seem like a distant problem, a danger that inhabits places like the live animal market in Wuhan, China, which may have been the root of the Covid-19 pandemic.

"I think there's this real sense here in the United States that the disease is something that comes from somewhere else," said Ann Linder, associate director of the law and policy program animal at Harvard Law School.

But there's a real risk in our own backyards — and our backyards. Since 2011, there have been more confirmed human cases of swine flu in the United States than anywhere else in the world. (That may be because other countries are doing less testing and surveillance, and many cases here and abroad are likely to go undetected, experts say.) Most have been linked to agricultural shows and fairs. "They've become kind of hotspots," Linder said.

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