As more cases of the new influenza emerged on Tuesday, deepening worries about a possible pandemic, several nations slammed their borders shut to pork from the United States and Mexico. Wall Street analysts predicted a sharp decline of pork sales in grocery stores, and some consumers began steering clear of pork chops.
The pork industry reacted with frustration. Medical authorities say that people cannot contract the swine flu from eating properly cooked pork. There is no evidence so far that the people who are becoming sick were in contact with pigs. In fact, authorities are not even sure how susceptible pigs are to infection with the new flu.
Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, convened a hearing on Tuesday on a subject he described as ?the so-called swine flu,? even as a campaign was mounted by farm groups to rename the virus ?North American influenza.?
?Swine flu is a misnomer,? said C. Larry Pope, the chief executive of Smithfield Foods, who said he feared panic among consumers. ?They need to be concerned about influenza, but not eating pork.?
Researchers say that based on its genetic structure, the new virus is without question a type of swine influenza, derived originally from a strain that lived in pigs. But the experts are still sorting out how long ago it infected pigs and how much it might have mutated when it jumped to humans.
?It?s fair to say that at some point the virus passed through a pig,? said Dr. Paul A. Offit, an infectious disease expert at Children?s Hospital of Philadelphia. ?It could have been months; it could have been years ago.?
Even if pigs were the original source of the disease, experts said they did not appear to be playing any role in its transmission now. The virus is passing from person to person, they said, most likely by the spread of respiratory droplets.
The assurances from medical authorities have not forestalled a pork panic.
Several countries on Tuesday announced that they were banning some or all pork products from the United States, angering trade negotiators and hog farmers. To date, countries including the Philippines, Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Ecuador have banned pork from the United States, with Mexican pork exports also covered by most of those bans.
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