The latest theory to get the Beck treatment, apparently. will be one about the swine flu vaccine. This has been getting a lot of attention in the usual places on the Internet, with theories abounding about the vaccine being untested and deadly, not to mention about laws that would allow you to be sent to a quarantine camp if you refuse to take the shot. There are many, many others out there too -- when it comes to this sort of thing, there's almost no end to the creativity of the theorists. (Trust me on this. We get e-mails about it almost daily from varioius people concerned about the vaccine; their warnings of what's going to happen can get pretty wild.)

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Huh? Swine flu, the illness we've all been hysterical about for months now, is not coming across as a serious disease? What's up with that?

My first thought was that this might be related to the overall anti-vaccination trend promoted by the likes of Jenny McCarthy; not that parents are concerned about a flu shot causing autism, necessarily, but in a general climate of increasing fear about whether vaccinations might do more harm than good to individual children, it makes sense that people would be skeptical of a brand new one.

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The bottom line: There is legitimate reason to fear that CAFOs are breeding grounds for "novel" viruses. But we don't really know what's going on because independent scientists have limited access to CAFOs, the  CAFO operators minimize testing of animals and CAFO workers, and "industrial animal agriculture... pays for virtually all the animal sciences research going on at land-grant universities today," according to Robert Martin, a senior officer with the Pew Environmental Group.

The entire piece is worth reading for its nuanced, careful, and comprehensive look at the science of swine flu, but I was struck by one fact that had little to do with science, per se. CAFO workers are considered to be a major vector for human-to-human virus transfer, but CAFOs aren't routinely inspected by the government agency that is supposed to look after worker safety, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).

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Since April, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention believe that the virus formerly known as swine flu, now called influenza A H1N1, has infected one million Americans. Of 302 deaths in the United States to date that have been attributed to this flu, the CDC has detailed information on 266 of them, according to the Associated Press. The CDC has found that 15 of the 266 were pregnant women -- or about 6 percent. That doesn't sound like that many, but pregnant women only make up about one percent of the United States population.

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The bacon-flavored themes probably aren't purposefully repetitive, but that's OK because these seemingly unrelated story lines share a common bond: They are each part of what might be called piggish capitalism -- an economic theory that mixes subsidization, consolidation and deregulation and that now endangers us all.

Take the pandemic scare: The Associated Press says scientists suspect swine flu began in a Mexican town that "has been protesting pollution from a large pig farm" partially owned by the Smithfield company. That's the same Smithfield that used three decades of lax antitrust enforcement and corporate welfare to become one of the few mega-corporations now controlling global agribusiness.

Whether or not swine flu is ultimately attributed to this company is less important than the justifiable reason factory farming is a suspect. As Pew Charitable Trusts documented in 2008, researchers have long warned that industrial agriculture means high concentrations of waste, overuse of antibiotics and "continual cycling of viruses and other animal pathogens in large herds" -- all factors that increase the possibility of diseases like swine flu.

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What's that? Not smallpox? Oh, sorry, I guess I mean bubonic plague then. Ebola?

No, not those either? And no mass casualties, you say?

Funny, judging from the media-fueled panic these past few weeks, you'd swear the planet was caught in the grip of some unstoppable killer. As it happens, it's nothing worse than good old influenza. That's right, the flu, albeit a slightly more problematic variant than the seasonal one we're used to, and one whose genetic code could -- could -- mutate into something truly menacing. Yes, specialists have been worrying over the possibility of a catastrophic flu pandemic for many years now, but by all accounts, this isn't it. This is not the Big One. It's not even, at this point, a Little One. May I point out that more than 35,000 Americans perish each year from seasonal non-swine influenza?

But in this, the age of hysteria, we overreact as usual, oblivious to perspective and unable to make rational decisions. Already we've seen hospital and hotel quarantines, temporary school closures, the mass slaughter of animals.

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The key ingredient in Tamiflu is shikimic acid, which can be extracted from star anise. But it's not easy -- it's a time consuming procedure that derives only one kilogram of acid from every 30 kilograms of pods. There are other ways to produce shikimic acid, but so far, the cheapest method for industrial scale production is to use star anise, the fruit of an evergreen shrub that is grown mostly in southern China. According to some reports, 80 percent of China's star anise harvest goes to Roche, Tamiflu's manufacturer.

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Mexico City has been ground zero for the latest swine flu pandemic. It is the city where the most people have been infected by this deadly virus and where the most people have also already died from it. One of the world's most populated and most densely packed urban areas, the city is a perfect petri dish for cultivating viruses. Physically sealed off from the rest of the world by a ring of volcanic mountains, Mexico City is becoming increasingly isolated as more and more countries cancel flights in and out of the city and chilangos (residents of Mexico City) are no longer welcome in hotels and resorts in other parts of the country. Even if chilangos aren't traveling outside the country so much these days, images of the capital continue to appear on the front pages of newspapers and during prime-time newscasts all over the globe. The images shown, inevitably, are of people wearing face masks.

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And the terrible predictions of Revelation seemed to have come to pass when, in 1347, a sinister, horrific malady began sweeping through Europe, cutting down nearly everyone in its ruthless path. In fact, the image of the Grim Reaper, a skeletal Death with a scythe, entered our iconography as a result of the most dreaded disease the world had ever known: the Black Plague. By the time it had done its dastardly work, the population of Europe had been so severely decimated that human life on every level, from personal and social to religious, political and economic, was forever altered.

The plague was so overwhelming and so relentless that medieval man had only one explanation for it: the wrath of God. It was compared to the biblical Great Flood and was seen as yet another attempt at divine housecleaning. People were convinced that, as in Noah's time, the human race was scheduled for destruction; more than one chronicler of the day sincerely believed that he was witnessing "the extermination of mankind."

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WTKK-FM isn't disclosing what comments led to Jay Severin's suspension, but they certainly had plenty of material to choose from. In a broadcast this week, Severin said:

Now, in addition to venereal disease and the other leading exports of Mexico -- women with mustaches and VD -- now we have swine flu... When we are the magnet for primitives around the world -- and it's not the primitives' fault, by the way, I'm not blaming them for being primitives, I'm merely observing they are primitives -- and when you scoop up some of the world's lowest of primitives in poor Mexico and drop it down in the middle of the United States -- poor, without skills, without language, not share our culture, not share our hygiene, haven't been vaccinated... Millions of leeches from a primitive country come here to leech off you...

Now, at this particular moment in history, they are exporting to us a rather more active form of disease, which is the swine flu.

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The scientists haven't, of course, put their warnings in exactly those terms. It's their job to outline the all-too-believable possibilities, although we also have a calm president who's more interested in keeping us rational than in stirring up our worst nightmares. But there is one place to turn to for images of desolate landscapes nearly wiped clean of freethinking creatures, of feverish, suffering people who suddenly turn into something not quite human, of rational people reduced to scrabbling for survival instead of just going to Target to pick up whatever they need: the movies, capable of feeding and intensifying our worst anxieties.

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"This individual was a lead advance for the security detail of Energy Secretary Chu. The individual traveled to Mexico in advance of Secretary Chu's visit, arriving there on April 13th. He began to feel ill on April 16th, developed a fever on the 17th. He returned to the United States on April 18th," Gibbs said. "The following day, he visited his brother's home, where he likely spread the virus to his nephew... Over the course of the 20th and 21st, the individual's wife and young son developed flu-like symptoms... [A]ll four individuals experienced only mild symptoms, and all four have recovered."

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Grist ended up publishing one full-length reaction piece from Merritt Clifton, the editor of Animal People, described in Clifton's bio as "the leading independent newspaper providing original investigative coverage of animal protection worldwide."

Clifton's piece starts with a bang:

Thirty years ago this month I knelt beside the Yamaska River in southern Quebec with a test kit --  downstream from several of the then-largest, factory-type pig farms in North America (which happened to lie upstream from the water intakes for the cities of Farnham and St. Hyacinthe) -- and found that the Yamaska literally contained more extraneous chemicals from pig excrement than H2O.

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I would tell members of my family -- and I have -- I wouldn't go anywhere in confined places now. It's not that it's going to Mexico, it's you're in a confined aircraft when one person sneezes it goes all the way through the aircraft. That's me. I would not be, at this point, if they had another way of transportation, suggesting they ride the subway. So from my perspective, what it relates to is mitigation.

If you're out in the middle of a field and someone sneezes, that's one thing. If you're in a closed aircraft or a closed container, a closed car, a closed classroom, it's a different thing.

Now, that may actually be solid medical advice. But it certainly isn't the picture of calm that the administration has been working very hard to portray recently. And so his spokeswoman sent out a statement to reporters, attempting to walk back her boss' comments:

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Specifically, what Loven asked the president was, "With the flu outbreak spreading and worsening, can you talk about whether you think it's time to close the border with Mexico and whether -- under what conditions you might consider quarantining, when that might be appropriate?"

Given the tenor of some coverage of the virus, and Americans' understandable fears about it, Loven's question probably did have to be asked. Certainly that question is out there in the media already, so it's not bad to have the president himself weigh in on it. But the very premise of it is faulty. Like Obama said, "From [public health officials'] perspective, it would be akin to closing the barn door after the horses are out, because we already have cases here in the United States."

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