Reading that swine flu is endemic of pigs... to me this means h1n1/swine flu ONLY originates in pigs. So here's the argument:
If all pigs are destroyed, then H1N1/swine flu would cease to exist.
T / F ? and help explain please... medical jargon welcome.
First, I think you misunderstand the term "endemic." In infectious disease epidemiology, endemic means a particular disease is self sustaining in a given population. This can mean different things, depending on the type and virulence of disease to which you are referring. The incidence and prevalence for an endemic disease can vary wildly depending on a large number of factors. Endemic cholera, malaria or measles are very different slices of the population.
Even if you are referring to endemic in the broader, ecological sense, no. Swine flue is so called not because it "belongs" to swine. It is called swine flu because some of the first virological assays indicated that the majority of the DNA present in this particular virus originated from a swine flu. The knowledge changed, but the name stuck. More on this later.
Second, there may or may not have been a time when the primary reservoir for this particular virus was swine. This has not been the case since the point it became transmissable between humans. In fact, the only reason you know about this at all is because its human to human transmissability. If the primary mode of transmission was still from a swine reservoir to humans, this would barely rate a news story. Swine don't move around so much. People and birds do.
Third, from what I understand of the evolutionary history of this strain, it's still known with any degree of certainty what the original reservoir was in the first place.
Remember during the early days when the Egyptian government mandated the slaughtering of all pigs? That was and remains the height of asinine responses. By that point in the spring, the pigs weren't the problem, people were.
