The links between animal husbandry, environmental protection and human health are again underlined with the outbreak of swine flu in Mexico. So too is the truly global nature of society today. If the world has suddenly discovered that banking and financial regulation needs to be handled on a global basis, then this outbreak of swine flu demonstrates why environmental legislation also needs to be harmonised to the highest level.

There has been considerable debate about why so many deaths have happened in Mexico, while cases in other parts of the world have been relatively mild.

Environmentalists are increasingly looking at the possible origin of the virus itself, which could be a massive pig farm in the Perote Valley that raises more than a million pigs a year and where the smell, effluent and flies are unbearable. Local people have suffered severe respiratory diseases and one case of the H1N1A virus was reported as being from there.

Quite apart from the question of the well-being of animals we rear intensively for food, whether it is pigs or chickens, the human implications when something goes wrong are, we now see, on a global scale, and too enormous for environmental and health concerns to be ignored.

Failure to address these concerns destroys the environment – as the destruction of Lough Sheelin due to pig slurry during the 1980s taught us here. It can destroy an industry, as the dioxin scare of last Christmas showed, and now it is having a calamitous effect on the health of the vulnerable, as well as on the economies of an already fragile world.