Afghanistan's only pig quarantined in flu fear

Reports from Afghanistan have reached the international news world upon learning that
the Kabul Zoo Director, Aziz Gul Saqib, has placed the pig in quarantine since Sunday after visitors expressed alarm that it could spread the new flu strain. Fortunately there are no pig farms in Afghanistan and no direct civilian flights between Kabul and Mexico. The pig was a gift to the zoo from China, which itself quarantined some 70 Mexicans, 26 Canadians and four Americans in the past week, but later released them. Visitors expressed their concern for the pigs presence, and because influenza is contagious and it passes between people and animals, it will not hurt to lock the lone pig away. The Kabul Zoo, however, has not been in the best shape as many of the other zoos in the world since it suffered on the front line of Afghanistan's 1992-1994 Civil War, where Mujahideen fighters ate the deer and rabbits, and shot the zoo's lone elephant.



Opinion: It certainly reads like these folks are pandering to the masses and find it easier to lock up the, uh... already caged pig, rather than explain and educate them about how swine flu works. The ignorance shown by the Afghanistan people and the Kabul Zoo show their need of some sort of education that does not involve teaching their children to become child soldiers. Experts have said that you cannot contract the H1N1 virus from direct contact with a pig or pork products, but rather has grown through interpersonal contact rather than animal-person contact. They should be thankful though, that the Afghan-Muslim people do no eat pork products, because this ignorance could carry over to the thought that the influenza can be contracted through pork products, which could cause a real stir, in an already unstable country.