Swine flu and bigger project

I am working on a bigger project looking at ride-hailing, but I didn’t want to leave my ones of readers left without something to read.

This article on Swine Flu struck me, because I had though the government was serious about tacking the problem. The Philippines stopped the import of Vietnamese pork earlier. And all Vietnamese visitors to Taiwan were being checked for pork products, after authorities there found traces of the swine flu in a pork sandwich.

Pork makes up 75% of total meat consumption in Vietnam. I couldn’t find how that has changed over time, but overall calories from animal protein have doubled in the past 20 years, which is a fast rate. From the article: Vietnam produced 3.82 million tonnes of pork in 2018, equivalent to 72 percent of the country’s entire meat production, up 2.2 percent from 2017, the report said.

The government is taking the crisis seriously, with more than 4,000 pigs destroyed. The difficulty is that it appears to be coming from China, which is facing its own epidemic. Given how porous the border appears to be, the government will have to not only step up monitoring but also continue it to make sure that the virus isn’t re-introduced. Luckily, it isn’t harmful to humans, but just wait until it makes the jump.

On a happier note, a company is making rice flour straws, in order to decrease consumption of plastic straws. The new trend is getting rid of plastic - I think we are going to see more of this globally. People are increasingly becoming more environmentally conscious. The Ho Chi Minh City government has an initiative to decrease plastic bag usage too.

You heard it here first: The next big movement is to ban all plastics!