As the H1N1 virus waxes and wanes among humans, health officials have stepped up scrutiny on a whole new population: pigs.
Are swine somehow culpable, as genetic tendrils of the virus suggest? And does the way we raise them, on industrial farms, create the potential for future pandemics?
The answers are maybe and maybe.
In any case, pigs are paying the price. Thousands were scheduled for euthanasia abroad, and several countries banned the import of U.S. pork products, even though the illness is not food-borne. Health officials have stressed that people cannot contract influenza from eating pork. And they agreed to stop using the phrase swine flu when referring to the recent outbreak.
What's drawing attention now is a remarkable attribute of the pig's biology that's important in the context of a flu that has spread to 34 countries and sickened 7,520 people.
Pigs make excellent "mixing vessels" for new flu viruses. Susceptible to not only swine flu but also avian and human flu, pigs are particularly efficient intermediaries in the transmission from species to species.
If they host more than one virus at a time, the viruses can undergo a genetic "reassortment" and emerge entirely different, perhaps even more virulent.
Critics say today's industrial pig farms dramatically increase the odds of transmission - both pig to pig, and pig to person, through farmworkers - because they pack thousands of animals so closely.
So meet Wilma.
She's distinct among the 1,400 sows on Scott Augsburger's 350-acre farm in Reinhold, Lancaster County, because she has a name. Her unusual coloring reminded one of his workers of Fred Flintstone.
But she's emblematic of a clean approach to farming that health officials are stressing more and more.
Sowing operations, where young pigs are born, have the highest levels of bio-security. Augsburger maintains a "closed herd," meaning no other pigs come onto the farm. Ever.
Wilma and the other sows are artificially inseminated. They average 2.3 litters a year, up to 12 piglets a litter.
It takes about six months for the piglets to grow to 260 pounds, and then they're sent to a processing plant in Souderton to become hams, chops, and bacon.
At any given time, there are nearly 6,000 pigs on the farm.
"Our goal is to keep our hogs as healthy as possible," Augsburger says. Wilma and the others are his paycheck, and profit margins are slim.
Augsburger, 46, never considered doing anything else. Pig-farming is what his father did, and his grandfather before him, on the same farm.
But in the early 1980s, things changed radically. He began a new bio-security regime that he says has kept his herd free of major disease.
The only people his pigs see are Augsburger and his two employees. No one else is allowed into - or even near - the buildings. The Inquirer was not permitted to visit.
Before going into the barn, workers undress in an outer room and "shower in," washing their hair and scrubbing their nails with a brush. They exit on the opposite side and put on boots and coveralls that never leave the barn.
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