I beg pardon poemless, my original post was a bit sloppy.  I didn't mean that the flu was "invented" or fictional -- neither deliberately released, nor a story deliberately concocted to distract us from the disaster of corporate ag;  I see that my careless wording could give that impression.  Not what I meant :-)

I meant that the media coverage of the flu, like all corporate media coverage, is all about bandaids and authority (control, protect, contain, "make war on" a problem) and/or individual survivalism (special: what you can do to protect yourself from lethal foreign viruses!) and never about root causes (understanding and preventing a problem).  So the media coverage distracts us from contemplating the root causes of disease and public health problems generally;  much as the "race for the cure" hoopla, little pink ribbons, breathless PRs about "gene therapy," stern lifestyle advice and various other distraction tactics work to keep us from asking hard-nosed questions about connections between industrial toxicity and geopositionally clustered cancer rates.  

As to conspiracy, I think my old Conspiracy Theory LQD kinda says it all.  The conspiracy of wealth and power protecting itself is always with us;  the meat industry owns a lot of politicians, and the corporadoes who own the media are very good friends with their advertisers, and so it goes.

A Killer Disease Scare is always good for attracting eyeballs and ears to media, as advertisers know all too well.  At a time when awkward questions are being asked about the power and corruption of the corporate barons, some non-banking-related headlines are probably not unwelcome among our masters.  I think there's some selective headlining going on (as always); and that when you get beneath the big bold headlines, the way the story is being told is carefully avoiding the problem of risk origin, i.e. the very risky practises of corporate agriculture undertaken in the confident expectation that all costs will be borne by the taxpayer if the risk goes wrong.

The idea that risk can be palmed off on some other country (particularly one w/which one shares a land border) is part of this fiction of "externality" which afflicts paleo-economics.  Viruses know no borders, neither does a destabilised climate or pollen drift or pollution (water or air or whatever).  The idea of hermetically sealed borders and "containment" is an authoritarian fantasy:  borders are arbitrary fictions and all membranes are porous one way or another.  So I do think that NAFTA and other arrangements that have made it easier for corporations to "save money" by operating with lousy personal hygiene in one (poor) country, in order to show big profits to stockholders in another (rich) country, is foolish, ignorant, and highly vulnerable to blowback of all kinds.  The world is far from flat, and the winds blow all around it and back home again.  What Smithfield does in Mexico will come home to Americans and indeed to the whole world;  what we do to animals in CAFOs will come home to humans.  In the real world, it can hardly be otherwise.

The difference between theory and practise in practise ...