As I wrote yesterday, based on some excellent reporting in Grist and elsewhere, local residents in La Gloria, Mexico, where the swine flu outbreak may have originated, suspect that the source is the Granjas Carroll industrial pig farm. The facility is half-owned by U.S.-based Smithfield Foods, the world’s largest pork processor.

Although some 60 percent of the town was sick with some sort of flu recently, it’s not clear that it was swine flu and Smithfield denies that any of its hundreds of thousands of pigs were infected. Smithfield subsidiaries “routinely administer influenza virus vaccination to their swine herds and conduct monthly tests for the presence of swine influenza,” the company said in a statement.

However, the current swine flu outbreak appears to involve a new strain of H1N1 influenza, so vaccinations against earlier forms of the virus may not work against this one.

The Mexican pig industry, meanwhile, denies all responsibility.

“We deny completely that the influenza virus affecting Mexico originated in pigs, because it has been scientifically demonstrated that this is not possible,” said a statement issued by the National Organization of Pig Production and Producers and its president, Mario Humberto Quintanilla González.

But the industry’s insistence that the disease cannot be transmitted from pigs to people contradicts almost everything the Mexican government has been saying about it, reports David Kirby for The Huffington Post. Mexico’s Health Minister, Jose Angel Cordova, has said the virus, “mutated from pigs, and then at some point was transmitted to humans.”

Fortunately, U.N. health inspectors don’t seem to be taking anyone’s word for it and will conduct their own investigation.

–

TWI is on Twitter. Please follow us here.

“There is no connection between the severity of a pandemic and border crossings,” Osterholm said Tuesday during an interview on Public Radio International’s “The World.” What’s more, closing the border could actually inhibit the United States’ ability to obtain what it needs to treat patients and stop the swine flu’s spread. “Few people realize how many of the medical products we use in this country are made outside of the country,” Osterholm said.

These products include the circuits for mechanical ventilators that help people breathe in a severe case of the flu. “One of largest producers of circuits in the world is in Mexico,” said Osterholm. “So if we suddenly shut down the border we’d limit how many ventilators we could provide.”

So despite the hysteria in the United States and in Europe — where the European Union health minister just issued an advisory against travel to the United States and Mexico — Osterholm says: “Border closings in and of themselves do not accomplish walling yourself off from that virus.”

–

TWI is on Twitter. Please follow us here.

Influence comes in many forms. Often, influencing the influencers is a smart strategy. Free food never hurts, either.

The head of public relations for the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer makes free food a centerpiece of his “tips for managing journalists” an industry conference, Advertising Age reports.

In this video clip, Pfizer’s global public relations chief Ray Kerins explains his strategy for working with journalists, whose coverage, in the words of Advertising Age,”so heavily impacts the pharmaceutical giant’s reputation.” Kerins says:

“…[T]omorrow, we’re hosting a lunch with the communications team for Linda Johnson, who’s one of the top health care folks at the Associated Press. She’s outstanding, she’s brilliant we love her to death. But we’re bringing her into our home and we’re saying, look, here’s who we are and here’s what we’re talking about. She’s not meeting with executives, she’s meeting with communications, with my folks on the media team. We do this about every other week.”

Johnson won’t be the first journalist to be feted at Pfizer. Kerins estimates that his team met with about 115 journalists in 2008, on and off-site.

No doubt it’s a good investment for Pfizer. Critical media coverage can cost a drug company billions in lost sales, diminished good will, and even legal and political scrutiny. Stories with headlines like “Maker of Vioxx Accused of Deception” hurt Merck’s bottom line.

Kerins claims that that his team has “no agenda” when journalists are made honored guests at corporate headquarters. But, as someone who has worked in the pharmaceutical industry, writing ad copy for various well-known brands including some of Pfizer’s products, I can categorically say “Yeah, right.” He may not be pitching specific stories, but he’s almost certainly mounting a charm offensive.

The pharmaceutical industry is perhaps second only to Hollywood in the economic emphasis placed on lunch. A couple advertising agencies where I worked did a brisk business designing customized boxes for bagels served at so-called “Lunch and Learns”–promotional events where company representatives, or scientists hand-picked by the company, tried to woo doctors into prescribing the latest ACE inhibitor or antidepressant. We’d get memos from the marketing teams explaining how our colorful bagel boxes, emblazoned with company logos and drug tag lines, reinforced the key sales messages of the lecture.

When big pharma reaches out to influencers, such as doctors and journalists, its always couched in terms of education — but Merck is not an educational institution. It sells drugs.

Ironically, a lot of the worst press big pharma has gotten in recent years centered on the companies’ shameless attempts to ingratiate themselves with physicians through free food, conveniently-packaged information, and flattery. Apparently, Pfizer has decided that the cure for bad press is to offer journalists similar perks.

This afternoon, House Dems announced that they’d cut a provision from their version of the stimulus bill that would have made it easier for states to cover family planning services for low-income women, Elana Schor of TPMDC reports:

House Democrats have removed a provision from their stimulus bill that would exempt states from the need to get waivers for covering family planning under Medicaid. The family-planning aid has been the subject of repeated Republican attacks over the past few days, and health care advocates were dismayed by the Democrats’ decision to give in on its removal.

“We are disappointed that the Medicaid Family Planning State Option, a common-sense provision to expand basic health care to millions of women, including many who have lost their jobs in the current economic downturn, was a victim of misleading attacks and partisan politics, and dropped from the economic stimulus bill,” Planned Parenthood for America President Cecile Richards said in a statement today.

Obama wanted the birth control provision cut because he saw it as an obstacle to the bipartisan support he is seeking for the economic stimulus package. This decision is sure to upset his supporters in the women’s health movement, whose leaders lobbied forcefully for the birth control provision.

The tobacco industry is fighting a lonely battle against health insurance for poor kids.

A coalition of tobacco industry groups ran a full-page ad in the influential Capitol Hill newspaper, Roll Call, on Monday warning President-elect Barack Obama that a proposed tobacco tax hike to cover the expansion of the popular State Child Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) would be an “economic disaster.”

The ad is sponsored by the National Association of Tobacco Outlets (NATO), the American Wholesalers and Manufacturers Association (AWMA), and the Southern Association of Wholesale Distributors (SAWD), which claim, jointly, to represent the employees of tobacco sellers, wholesalers, and manufacturers. [To view full-sized ad, click on thumbnail, above.]

Congressional Democrats hope to score an early victory by passing an SCHIP expansion. The bill is expected to face vote in the House and a markup in the Senate Finance Committee this week. The legislation will reauthorize the program before it expires on March 31.

The expansion of the SCHIP rolls would be funded with a tobacco tax hike. The size of the proposed increase hasn’t been officially announced, but an earlier version of the bill vetoed by president Bush in 2007 would have added 61 cents to the price of a package of cigarettes–an extra $222.65 per year for a pack-a-day smoker.

The ad in Roll Call asserts, without supporting evidence, that the tobacco tax would cause “economic and employment devastation” by putting more than 117,000 tobacco industry workers, such as convenience store clerks, warehouse workers, and tobacco farmers out of work.

However, a $35 billion expansion program to cover an additional 4 million people could create at least that many new jobs, if the money were spent on expanding public programs like Medicaid, according, at least, to one advocate for expanding SCHIP.

“If the bulk of that spending were going into Medicaid, I can imagine that something on that order jobs could result.” said Michael Lighty, Director of Public Policy for the California Nurses Association.

The greatest job growth from an SCHIP expansion would be expected in those states that put the money directly into private programs like Medicaid, as opposed to private health insurance programs, Lighty explained.

Opponents of the tax increase, like Big Tobacco, argue that increasing cigarette taxes burdens the poor disproportionately because lower income people are more likely to smoke. However, by the same token, lower income Americans will disproportionately benefit from both reduced tobacco consumption and expanded health insurance coverage for poor children. Plans vary, but private health insurance for one child typically costs more than $223 per year. So, even families with smoking parents could easily come out ahead if they get healthcare for their kids, despite paying more per pack of cigarettes, explains Ron Pollack, Executive Director of Families USA, a national consumer health organization that supports the plan to expand SCHIP with tobacco taxes.

SCHIP serves the children of America’s working poor–kids whose parents make too much to qualify for Medicaid, but not enough to afford private health insurance. Currently, about 6 million children are covered by SCHIP. The proposed expansion would relax eligibility standards to cover an additional 4 million children, according to Pollack.

The proposed expansion is popular with Democratic legislators, unions, pharmaceutical and insurance trade groups, physicians, and the general public. Even some moderate Republicans support the plan. An earlier version of the legislation passed Congress in 2007 only to be vetoed by President Bush.

The rhetoric in the Roll Call ad suggests that the prospect of a Democratic president is making the tobacco industry very nervous. This time, when the SCHIP bill reaches the oval office, George Bush won’t be there to veto it.

Reports are saying that Palin’s stands on issues of abortion and sex education may be attracting evangelical voters and perhaps scaring off Clinton supporters. What we haven’t heard much about, though, is how her positions on women’s health have played out in Palin’s home state.

Alaska’s population is 15.4 percent Alaska Native or Native American — the largest percentage of any U.S. state. That’s relevant to a discussion on women’s issues for a few big reasons. The rate of rape and sexual assault among Indian women is 3.5 times higher than among women of any other racial group in America. In addition, sexual assault victims in Indian country frequently lack access to basic health resources, including rape kits and screening for sexually transmitted diseases.

This is especially true in Alaska and other rural areas. In some parts of Alaska, rape victims have to travel for days just to reach an Indian Health Service clinic, according to human-rights reports by Amnesty International. And many Indian Health Service clinics have no trained staff members who can provide physical and mental health resources for victims. (You can read about one Alaskan woman’s story — and the stories of other Indian women — in a piece I wrote last year.)

Palin opposes abortion, even in cases of rape and incest. Roughly 25 percent of rapes result in unwanted pregnancies.

Alaska Native women already face discrimination when it comes to their right to choose. Thanks to the Hyde amendment, the Indian Health Service can’t use federal money to pay for abortions, except in cases of rape, incest against a minor or when the mother’s life is at risk.

In an interview last year, Charon Asetoyer, the director of the Native American Women’s Health Education Resources Center, had this to say about the Hyde amendment: “We’re the only race in the country that is denied access to abortion merely because of our race.”

Palin’ support of such legislation — and her stands on reproductive health in general — shows she might well be out of step with a large percentage of the women of her own state. We’ll have to wait and see how women across the country respond to her.