Al Jazeera examines the threat of the Mexican swine flu epidemic.

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Al Jazeera reports on Iceland’s new political landscape and the country’s search for a new economic roadmap. Clearly, self-regulating free market ideology seems destined for the trash bin of history.

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The United States is the world’s second largest pork producer and pork production has been growing at quite a clip. From 2000 through 2006, US pork production expanded 15.8%. Only China, the world’s largest pork producer and consumer, grew faster. When it comes to the global pork trade, China distorts the picture only because it is so dominant. In 2006, China accounted for 48% of total world hog production.

Over the last 20 years, the number of backyard hog farms in China has gradually declined, but backyard hog operations still dominate in both the number of hog farms and share of total pork production in China. Still the trend is towards industrial hog production in what is termed a confined animal feeding operation or CAFO. Indeed, the Chinese budget for 2008-09 allocates 2.8 billion yuan from to support live pig production to build breeding farms and standard large scale piggeries. If the experience with CAFOs of the United States and now Mexico is any indication, China is unwittingly creating an environmental and health disaster. Still this is for the future, it is the present that should concern us.

Today the Mexican Health Secretary, José Ángel Córdova, reported that tests now prove that a four-year-old boy contracted swine flu in the La Gloria community of Veracruz state, where that community has been protesting pollution from a CAFO that isn’t so confined. These tests now put the start date for the swine flu epidemic at least two weeks earlier than the first death previously confirmed by the Mexican government and more importantly begins to pinpoint the start of the epidemic in La Gloria. The CAFO is run by Granjas Carroll de México which is a joint venture of Agroindustrias Unidas de México and Smithfield Foods.

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On Monday, in response to a growing swine flu epidemic, the World Health Organization raised the pandemic alert level from three to four. Beyond Mexico, the United States and five other countries were dealing with confirmed cases of the flu. Martin Blaser of the New York University School of Medicine discusses the scope of the outbreak and how world governments are responding.

More from the New York Times:

State and federal officials intensified their response to the swine flu outbreak on Tuesday, with President Obama asking Congress for $1.5 billion in supplemental funding and New York reporting two new potential clusters at local schools.

The global response included more restrictions on travel to and from Mexico, the origin of the outbreak and the only country to have reported deaths from swine flu. Officials there shut down schools across the country and limited restaurant service in Mexico City in an effort to curb transmission of the virus, which has killed at least 152.

Israel confirmed its first two cases of swine flu, which is now in at least seven countries. Ten others including China and Russia, which were set to quarantine passengers suspected of having the flu, are investigating possible cases.

Dr. Richard Besser, the acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, termed the early days of swine flu in the United States as a “pre-pandemic period” and was blunt about the potential impact of this influenza.

“As this moves forward,” Dr. Besser said, “I fully expect that we will see deaths from this infection.”

He said that five people confirmed to have swine flu had been hospitalized in the United States — two in Texas and three in California, where Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger declared a state of emergency. Still, the nation’s highest number of cases continued to be in New York City, where 44 people were confirmed to have swine flu.

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Worldfocus correspondent Kristen Gillespie interviews a former United Nations advisor in Lebanon and discusses the development of Hezbollah and its place in Shi’ite Lebanese society.

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