Who Is Legally Responsible?
Steven Trunnell's wife, Judy, was the first American resident to die from H1N1. A special education teacher in south Texas, she was eight months pregnant when she contracted the disease; she delivered the baby girl by Caesarean section shortly before she died. Now Trunnell is exploring a lawsuit against Smithfield Foods, the world's largest pork producer, which owns a swine farm in Mexico where the H1N1 outbreak may have originated. Trunnell's lawyer, Marc Rosenthal, claims that Smithfield's dense swine farms created the necessary conditions for H1N1's emergence — and that the company may therefore be responsible in some way for H1N1-related deaths. So far, however, tests done by Mexican authorities found no evidence of the H1N1 virus among Smithfield's Mexican pigs. (See pictures of the effects of swine flu in Mexico.)
For Trunnell, the question is more straightforward. "I need someone to be responsible for this," he says.
Trunnell may be the first person to seek legal redress for H1N1, but he's unlikely to be the last — Rosenthal has already taken on the family of another victim. And it's not hard to imagine parents whose children contracted the disease in class suing city officials for failing to close schools earlier.
It's up to the courts to decide the merit of Trunnell's case. But despite the fact that factory farms need to be cleaned up and that the response to H1N1 hasn't been perfect, it would be difficult for a judge or jury to assign blame for the natural actions of a virus. Pandemics have happened before, and they'll happen again. Modern science and technology now enable us to respond in ways we couldn't before — tracking emerging viruses in real-time and attempting to corral them. But we'll never control them.