By ANA CAMPOY and LAUREN ETTER
Mexico's top government epidemiologist said Wednesday that it is "highly improbable" that a farm in the Mexican state of Veracruz operated by Smithfield Foods Inc. is responsible for the nation's swine-flu outbreak.
Miguel Ángel Lezana, the government's chief epidemiologist, said in an interview that pigs at the farm are from North America, while the genetic material in the virus is from Europe and Asia.
Government health workers plan to re-test the pigs for any sign of swine flu, he said.
Veracruz is home to the illness's earliest known victim so far, though Mr. Lezana on Wednesday said a Bangladeshi street vendor in Mexico City was among the first victims. Locals have been pointing fingers at the pork-processing giant in the nearby village of Perote, run by Smithfield and the Mexican company Agroindustrias Unidas de Mexico S.A, as the source of the flu.
Virginia-based Smithfield says its farm has nothing to do with the virus. On the New York Stock Exchange, shares of Smithfield earlier Wednesday dropped 28 cents, or nearly 3%, to $9.16.
When news surfaced last week that a virus called swine flu was killing people in Mexico, C. Larry Pope, president and chief executive of Smithfield, dispatched two of his lieutenants, Chief Financial Officer Robert "Bo" Manly and Gregg Schmidt, president of international operations for the company's hog-production business, to Perote.
On Wednesday, Veracruz governor Fidel Herrera arrived in Perote in a helicopter. He periodically wiped his cellphone with a wet napkin. During one phone conversation, he told Smithfield's Mr. Schmidt that the company needed to be doing more in response to the rumors.
"The whole world is looking at this little town," Mr. Herrera said.
Mr. Schmidt said Smithfield officials had met with five Mexican state and federal agencies in the health, agriculture and food safety sectors. They agreed Smithfield would send nasal swabs from its Mexican hogs to a lab in the U.S. for genetic sequence analysis testing to determine whether they're the source of the virus.
The entire pork industry has been hurt by the swine flu outbreak, prompting industry protests that it has been unfairly impugned. But Smithfield has come under the sharpest fire.
The tension is linked to Smithfield's rocky past in the Veracruz region where its plant is located. Smithfield and its Mexican partner operate a farm that annually produces about one million hogs. Smithfield also has a 600,000-hog farm in the state of Sonora. The hogs are sent to non-Smithfield plants near Mexico City where animals are made into meat for consumption mainly in Mexico.
People in the Veracruz town of La Gloria protested when Smithfield first said it wanted to build the farm about two-and-a-half miles from the town. Townspeople erected roadblocks, picketed, and even hijacked a company truck, the company says. Smithfield decided to locate the farm farther out, about five to eight miles from the community.
But some community members grew concerned because the farm was situated in a dust-filled valley, which they worried would lead to hog waste mixing with the dust and causing respiratory problems.
When it was learned that five-year-old La Gloria resident Edgar Hernandez had contracted swine flu, locals began blaming Smithfield. Some people complain that a lagoon filled with pig waste has a foul stench. Edgar's mother says the farm creates a problem of flies, and wants authorities to do something about it. (Her son no longer shows signs of being ill.)
Smithfield says Mexico's environmental agency has audited the company's lagoons and recently said it was in compliance with environmental standards. Smithfield also says all who enter the farm must abide by quarantine procedures, including changing into clean clothes.
Smithfield's Mr. Pope says he thinks the events in Mexico have become "politicized," and that that "we know of no pigs that are sick, no people on those farms that are sick and no people in our plants" who are sick.
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