Reps: Please do not call it the swine flu

Farm-state lawmakers added their voices to those looking to protect the pork industry from bad press about  the swine flu.

And the first offensive they launched was against their own colleagues.

On Wednesday morning the House Agriculture Committee majority staff sent an e-mail out to all Democratic press secretaries asking them to stop referring to the Mexican-born flu as the “swine flu” and imploring them to stop using pig graphics on their webpages.

{mosads}“If I could make a request, please avoid using a pig in any graphics for the current flu outbreak that you are creating for your website and other media,” House Agriculture Committee communications director April Demert Slayton wrote in the e-mail, which was obtained by The Hill.

“As President Obama and other Administration officials have explained, the current flu outbreak is most properly called ‘H1N1 flu.’ The moniker ‘swine flu’ suggests that people are getting sick through consumption of pork products, which is not correct,” Slayton continued. “If you could please try to refrain from using ‘swine flu’ to refer to the outbreak (and please no pig graphics), this would be extremely helpful as the U.S. tries to maintain international trade and consumer confidence in our nation’s swine industry.”

Sources said the committee felt compelled to act after receiving repeated requests from lawmakers’ staffs for pig graphics.

Since the moment the flu outbreak spread from Mexico into the United States and around the world, it was labeled the “swine flu.”

In recent days the Department of Agriculture and the White House have begun to push back against that designation, starting to refer regularly to the virus as the “H1N1 flu.”

But the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) continued to call the virus the “swine flu.”

The naming rights — and their ramifications on the U.S. pork industry — were on full display on Tuesday during Senate Agriculture Committee Chairman Tom Harkin’s (D-Iowa) hearing on the flu.

Harkin sparred with witnesses, including those from the National Institutes of Health, over why the flu was being called the “swine flu” when it “doesn’t necessarily come from pigs” and “not one single pig in the U.S. … has this particular virus.”

For Harkin and others from poultry-producing states, the issue was monumental, as Wednesday’s newspapers reported that U.S. hog prices continued to decline over global fears that pork was unsafe to eat.

The fact that hundreds of members of Congress posted “swine flu” updates on their websites wasn’t helping.

“I think the label ‘swine flu’ is inaccurate because we haven’t gotten all the facts yet,” said Rep. David Scott (D-Ga.), the chairman of the Agriculture Subcommittee on Livestock, Dairy and Poultry. “We need to assure the public that our food supply is safe and that our pork industry has not been affected, because if we don’t do that, then we’ve got a whole other problem on our hands.”

Asked how significant a pork boycott would be to the U.S. economy, Scott said: “It could be big if we don’t move to get out the intelligent information.”

{mospagebreak}{mosads}The renaming campaign has bipartisan support.

“This is one time when I agree with our secretary of Agriculture, and I’ve disagreed with him quite a bit,” said Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), an Agriculture Committee member. “Defining it as ‘swine flu’ does send the wrong message.”

With that, members started getting the right message.

In an afternoon press release warning his constituents of a possible pandemic, Agriculture Committee Republican Mike Conaway (Texas) avoided using the term “swine flu,” opting instead for the preferred “H1N1 flu outbreak.”

And a Wednesday afternoon announcement from the Democratic staff of the House Education and Labor Committee mentioned the upcoming hearing on “H1N1 flu virus” preparation for schools and workplaces.

The chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, however, said that the damage had already been done.

“It shouldn’t be called the ‘swine flu,’ ” Rep. Collin Peterson (D-Minn.) said, blaming the media for running with a story before it had the necessary facts. “But I don’t think it’ll do much good now. It’s too late.”

Despite the insistence of the Department of Agriculture and farm-state lawmakers on changing the flu’s name in an effort to undo the damage and prevent any more from being piled on, many were not playing along.

The websites of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, among other major news organizations, were still calling it the swine flu in their reports that the World Health Organization on Wednesday had raised the flu’s pandemic threat level to the second-highest degree.

Even some in Congress had not yet gotten that message, either.

As of press time, the congressional website of Rep. Scott was still offering constituents “Daily Updates & Helpful Information Concerning The Swine Influenza (Flu).”