The NEW influensa virus. Det nye influensa viruset. Not the swine flu or the pig flu. I feel that I must do my part and inform as many people as possible that public health officials have said over and over again that humans cannot get sick from eating pork products. Keep eating pork. If you read just the headlines, chances are you are going to think that svineinfluensa or swine-flu implies that we can get this disease from eating pork. We know that the virus contains genetic material from pigs, birds, and humans. But there are no known instances of humans contracting the disease from animals. Only from humans. Humans to humans. It’s too bad though that most people don’t read entire articles. Most people probably don’t even look at a newspaper at all, much less read an entire article. Those who do read the newspaper, watch the news, or check out news on the internet, probably concentrate on the headlines. After all, one would think that if one has limited time, the headlines should relay the most important information. I wouldn’t say that any headline with the word or phrase “svineinfluensa” by itself informs the public of the most important part of the issue.
If you haven’t figured it out yet, svin means something to do with pigs in Norwegian. The word for ‘pig’ is gris. En gris = a pig. Grisen =the pig. Griser =pigs. Grisene =the pigs. Don’t say “griss” with a short ‘i,’ but rather “greeeeeeese” as in “geese” with an r after the g. And svin means ‘swine.’ Svinekjøtt means ‘pork.’ Svinekotelett means ‘pork chop.’ Svinestek means ‘roast pork.’ As the girlfriend of a pig farmer, pork producer, hog farmer, whatever you want to call him, I must say that I used to dislike most pork products, but after I ate GOOD pork (i.e. not super charred pork chops, insane pulled pork sandwiches, etc.) I realized that you don’t have to cook it until it’s so dry that you need to drink liquid at the same time as you swallow it. So I encourage you all to keep eating pork and once this virus has done it’s thing, eat pork a little pink. Don’t overkill it.
Just a little more trivia for you involving the word ‘pig’ or gris. A piggybank is called en sparegris which derives from the verb “å spare” (to spare) and gris (pig). A pig sty is en grisebinge. Pigtail (in terms of hairstyles) is hestehale (which literally means ‘horse-tail’) and pigtails means musefletter (muse means ‘mouse’ and fletter means ‘braids.’ For some reason in Norwegian ‘pigtails’ involve the words ‘mouse’ and ‘braids.’ I wonder where that comes from.
Vask hendene og bli hjemme hvis du er syk. Wash your hands and stay home if you are sick. But keep eating pork!
Check out aftenposten.no and see if you can understand any of the headlines or the stories!
