When Pigs Fly

Sometime in 2004, a pig was trucked with a herd of others to Sheung Shui Slaughterhouse, Hong Kong’s largest abattoir. It could have been shipped from any number of farms in China. The pig was penned in cramped conditions and later shoved onto a conveyor line. When it reached the end of the line it was electrocuted with a jolt to the head. A worker slit its throat. Before its carcass was hoisted up on a chain, scalded, and cleaned, scientists swabbed the pig’s mouth as part of a flu-monitoring program, run by Hong Kong University. The pig carried a seemingly harmless strain of influenza. The strain was genetically sequenced, baptized Sw/HK/915/04, entered into a database, and forgotten.

Five years later a flu epidemic, which originated in pigs, raced around the globe through air travel, leaving a trail of nearly 300,000 people dead from the United States to Brazil, China to New Zealand, South Africa to Finland. Scientists determined the outbreak began in Mexico, not far from a huge pig breeding farm. Poring over databases, looking for clues to the makeup of the killer virus, scientists discovered that Sw/HK/915/04, the influenza