It's flu season again-bad news for Smithfield Foods, the world's largest producer of pork. Six months ago, fears that the H1N1 strain might have originated at one of Smithfield's joint-venture facilities in northern Mexico put the company into crisis mode. Eventually the Mexican government determined there was no connection to the Smithfield (Va.) company's farms, but critical global markets for its products remained closed. And the Oct. 19 announcement that a Minnesota pig was the first in the country to have contracted the H1N1 virus, first called swine flu after early genetic tests suggested a link to pigs, could set off false fears of a link to human illness.
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