by Bryan Walsh

photo:  Steven and Judy Trunnell

In an initial step toward what could be the first wrongful-death suit of its kind, Texas resident Steven Trunnell has filed a petition against Smithfield Foods, the world's largest pork producer, based in Virginia, and the owner of a massive pig farm in Perote, Mexico, near the village of La Gloria, where the earliest cases of the new H1N1 flu were detected. Trunnell filed the petition in his home state on behalf of his late wife, Judy Dominguez Trunnell, the 33-year-old special-education teacher who on May 4 became the first U.S. resident to die of H1N1 flu.

In late April, Dominguez Trunnell, who was eight months pregnant, became ill with what would eventually be confirmed as H1N1 flu….Early this month Dominguez Trunnell passed away, weeks after her baby daughter was delivered via cesarean section.

Trunnell's petition seeks to investigate claims that the H1N1 outbreak began in Smithfield's massive pork operation in La Gloria and that the virus may have been caused in part by the conditions under which the farm operates, which the petition terms “horrifically unsanitary.”

If Trunnell ends up following through with a wrongful-death suit against Smithfield Foods, it will most likely make legal history. No one has ever tried to hold a corporation responsible for the inadvertent creation of an infectious disease. Trunnell and his lawyer, Marc Rosenthal, do not claim that Smithfield purposely bred the virus, but rather that its Perote operation, which raises some 1 million pigs annually in close quarters, established the necessary conditions for the virus to arise. If Smithfield had taken better care of its farm, the petition claims, H1N1 might never have been introduced to the world.

“We think that the conditions down there are a recipe for disaster,” says Rosenthal. “This type of virus is more likely to evolve and mutate in this much filth and putrescence. It's more than a mere coincidence that the first cases emerged right there in La Gloria.” (Read five things you need to know about H1N1 flu.) 

The suit will hinge on the fact that the first confirmed case of H1N1 appears to be a 5-year-old Mexican boy from La Gloria who lived not far from the Smithfield pork-farming operation. Local villagers had been complaining about the smell and the vast amounts of manure created by the Smithfield pig farms for some time, and H1N1 infection rates in the community were high. The idea that factory farming — where pigs are packed together closely — could provide a breeding ground for new viruses also has some scientific backing. A recent study by the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health found that such operations could increase the risk for transmission of new viruses, including swine and avian flu.

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