It was just such a question that outed this infected Minnesota pig in the first place, said Jeff Bender, a scientist working on the pig-testing project at the fair. He directs the U of M’s Center for Animal Health and Food Safety.

Bender and his Minnesota colleagues were collaborating with their counterparts at the University of Iowa in a study of influenza viruses at the human-pig interface. The purpose of the study funded by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was to better understand flu viruses for the benefit of humans and pigs alike.

“We were trying to understand how these viruses can move between species and to characterize that better,” Bender said.

One setting chosen for the research was fairs, where so many animals and people mingle.

This was not part of the massive global dragnet operation for the H1N1 virus. The first round of testing started last year before the outbreak of the aggressive new flu. Researchers performed DNA analysis on nasal swabs taken from pigs at the fair. They were looking for influenza. They found nothing.

This year, though, three of 103 pigs that were sampled came up positive on a preliminary test of swabs taken between Aug. 26 and Sept. 1. And one of the three did, indeed, prove to have the H1N1 virus.

The pigs showed no symptoms, Bender said.

“They were not sick at all,” he said.

Crossing species barriers
Experts were neither alarmed nor surprised by the finding. The infection already had been discovered in swine herds in Canada, Norway, the U.K., Argentina and several other places.

Further, it has long been known that pigs, birds and people can pass some types of influenza across species barriers.

When an influenza virus invades a body, it tries to bind with receptors – specific molecular components of the body’s cells. Once bound, the bug has a more secure platform to do its mischief in a body.

Some receptors are very similar in pigs, birds and people, said Joni Scheftel, the state public health veterinarian at the Minnesota Department of Health. So it stands to reason the virus has a better chance of leaping back and forth among those species.

Not so with our most common domestic pets.

“It does not appear that dogs and cats are susceptible,” Scheftel said.

The same is true with horses. Equine influenza infects donkeys, horses and mules but not the people who work with them. It follows that horses are not likely to catch H1N1 influenza. They lack the appropriate receptors.

A pet bird? “We just don’t know,” Scheftel said.

And while the craze for taking Vietnamese potbelly pigs as pets seems to have passed, anyone still keeping one of them might want to watch for symptoms.

By far though, the greatest influenza risk we face comes from other people, rather than from pigs or any other animal, Scheftel said.

Mixing vessels for viruses
Crossing the species barrier is not that easy.

When it happens, though, there is one real concern. Many experts consider pigs to be a “mixing vessel” for viruses because they have receptors that can accept avian and swine flu viruses. Some say humans could be mixing vessels, too.

The “mixing” can come when a cell is infected by two similar influenza viruses. Let’s say one invader in a pig is the H1N1 virus and the other is a different flu virus not yet found in humans. RNA swaps happen. And various combinations of the original invaders can be assembled into a new virus.

In other words, H1N1 could pick up some new RNA in pig cells then come back to infect humans in a new and different form that could be more virulent than the influenza virus now circulating. Of course, it also could be less so.

The same scenario could play out in birds. It’s a reason poultry workers are urged to get flu shots and to take other precautions. Health authorities want to minimize any chances that avian and human flu viruses could combine to create new bugs.

The finding of H1N1 in the State Fair pig serves as a reminder that the same safety precautions should be taken with pigs, said Bender at the Center for Animal Health and Food Safety. People who work with swine should get flu shots, stay home when they are sick and be especially vigilant about hand washing and other sanitation.

It also may be time to develop a hog vaccine for the virus, Bender said.

But there is no reason at this point to panic – no evidence in other countries where H1N1 jumped from humans to pigs that dangerous new viruses are jumping back. When pigs do catch the flu, they typically cough, run a fever and then recover after a few days, Bender said.

Facts, logic and fear
The facts are one thing. But the public’s understanding of the flu epidemic can be quite another.

We’ve insisted on calling this bug “swine flu,” even though the H1N1 influenza virus shares elements from birds, humans and pigs.

Even less logical is the rush to reject pork in many countries around the world, despite solid scientific evidence that there is no way anyone could catch the flu by eating meat.

So it’s not surprising that the fear instilled by the State Fair pig is largely for Minnesota’s pork industry. It is a $2 billion-a-year enterprise contributing 21,500 jobs to the state’s economy, says the Minnesota Pork Board.

And the industry already was hurting before this latest news emerged.

In his announcement on Monday, Vilsack reached hard to reassure the pork industry’s overseas markets: “We have fully engaged our trading partners to remind them that several international organizations, including the World Organization for Animal Health, have advised that there is no scientific basis to restrict trade in pork and pork products,” Vilsack said.

“People cannot get this flu from eating pork or pork products. Pork is safe to eat,” he stressed.

Vilsack also said that the finding does not suggest commercial herds are infected. He said that show pigs and commercially raised pigs are in separate segments of the swine industry. (I wonder about that observation because I interviewed many pig farmers at the State Fair for a different MinnPost story, and they were very much interested in selling their pigs commercially.)

Meanwhile, Vislack also reminded swine producers that they need to take extra care with good hygiene and biosecurity in order to prevent the introduction and spread of influenza viruses in their herds. He encouraged them to participate in a USDA swine influenza virus surveillance program.

As the high-stakes battle over health care escalates in Congress, Minnesota’s medical industry is pouring millions into lobbying with Medtronic and United Health Group alone spending more than $6.7 million this year to make their case to lawmakers.

“Medtronic is gangbusters for lobbying,” said Dave Levinthal, communications director at the Center for Responsive Politics.

The medical device manufacturer spent $3.2 million on lobbying this year and United Health paid out more than $3.5 million as Congress considers sweeping changes in the nation’s health-care system.

According to newly filed documents, Medronic  funneled $962,000 toward lobbying in just the third quarter of 2009, which runs from the beginning of July through the end of September. It spent about $2.3 million during the first two quarters.

“[In the first two quarters] that puts them at number one for companies that have lobbied on behalf of the medical device industry,” Levinthal said.

Medtronic — Minnesota’s 10th largest company by revenue and 18th largest employer – isn’t the only medical device maker spending money on lobbying. It is joined by St. Jude Medical of Minnesota and Boston Scientific, which is based in Massachusetts but employs more than 5,000 workers in Minnesota, making it the state’s 28th largest employer.

In the first six months of this year, St. Jude Medical spent $250,000 and Boston Scientific  $930,000 for lobbying, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

In the third quarter of this year, Boston Scientific spent another $480,000 on lobbying — up from $410,000 in the third quarter of 2008.

Although United Health and Medtronic are on par with what they spent on lobbying during the first three quarters of 2008, the Center for Responsive Politics found that many of the big spenders in the health sector, including Blue Cross/Blue Shield and Pfizer, increased their lobbying efforts significantly in the second quarter of 2009 compared to the second quarter of 2008. (The center has not yet analyzed and compared third quarter reports.)

Instead of feeling crisp and refreshed, Jesse Wu wakes up sluggish after 12 hours of sleep.

“If I sleep the right amount, I feel really good,” said the 25-year-old who lives in a suburb of Chicago, Illinois. “If I sleep too long, I feel groggy throughout the whole day.”

Like Wu, some feel exhausted after long hours of rest.

“Many people will tell you, they sleep a little worse when they sleep a long time on weekends,” said Dr. Daniel Kripke, co-director of Scripps Clinic Sleep Center in La Jolla, California. “Too much long sleep on weekends does not seem to make people feel better.” But he acknowledged that the reasons haven’t been determined.

For years, doctors have warned about the dangers of not getting enough shuteye — traffic accidents, weight gain, decreased productivity and immune protection, but the effects of oversleeping are not well-understood. There isn’t medical evidence to recommend that people who sleep long hours should change their habits, Kripke said.

Daylight saving time ends this Sunday, giving sleepers a bonus hour of sleep.

Wu savors his sleep. “I really enjoy it,” he said. In the morning, he needs five alarms — each with a different sound — that he smacks as he lumbers out of bed.

Like many professionals, Wu sleeps little on the weekdays (about five hours) and makes up for it on weekends, spending eight to 12 hours blissfully hibernating. Sometimes, after a long stretch, he wakes up too tired to function.

“After I’ve gotten so much sleep, the first situation is I fall asleep at 10 p.m., even though I’ve gotten 12 hours of sleep, because I feel so groggy,” said Wu, who works as a membership coordinator for a professional association.

This is known as sleep drunkenness, when a person hovers between sleep and wakefulness, said Dr. Lisa Shives, medical director at Northshore Sleep Medicine in Evanston, Illinois. In one case, a patient who had sleep drunkenness came to the emergency room because his wife thought he had a stroke.

“They’ll wake up and be in this weird state of sleep drunkenness,” Shives said. “If it’s really severe, you’re not going to be in any state to make decisions. If it’s just regular [case], a lot of us feel ‘blah,’ and most of us have to carry on and get going on a shower and cups of coffee.”

Oversleeping once in a while doesn’t present serious health risks, experts say.

But if you habitually sleep excessively, it could be the result of an underlying health problem. And it could be cutting into your life span.

“There’s been at least two epidemiological studies to show that if people get less than five hours, or more than 10 hours of sleep, it increases their mortality,” said Michael Breus, the clinical director of the sleep division at Southwest Spine and Sports in Scottsdale, Arizona.

A 2007 Finnish study found that the mortality risks increased by about 20 percent for people who slept more than eight hours. That same year, a British study found that people who slept five hours or less and those who slept more than eight hours also faced increased risks. Another study showed that people who routinely slept more than eight hours a night had a greater chance of stroke than others with less sleep.

Scientists say sleep and longevity are somehow associated, but there might be confounding factors.

“We don’t know if it’s the long sleep. It could be something else causing illness and the long sleep,” said Kripke, who has researched the topic for 35 years.

Here are possible factors for habitually excessive sleep, known as hypersomnia:

SIGG’s trendy aluminum water bottles have scored a lot of free advertising in recent years. In Touch Weekly raved about how Madonna’s kids sipped from the lightweight, eco-conscious and super-cute bottles. Julia Roberts was photographed with one. Jennifer Garner was too. The Swiss brand became the must-have accessory as consumers rushed to find alternatives to plastic bottles that contained bisphenol-A (BPA), a controversial chemical used to harden plastics, which some studies have linked to diabetes, premature puberty in girls and reduced sperm count in men. SIGG’s reusable aluminum bottles seemed the perfect antidote, a one-two punch protecting both our health and the environment.

But many consumers are feeling deceived now that the company has been outed for failing to tell the public that its bottles were not BPA-free, at least not the ones that were manufactured before August 2008. The company had boasted that its proprietary plastic liner didn’t leach BPA into liquid like other bottles did. What it neglected to divulge was that the bottles contained the substance at all. While there’s no evidence that the first-generation SIGGs did in fact leach BPA, there’s still plenty of grumbling at the company’s lack of disclosure. The news is especially troubling since the company internally acknowledged the chemical’s questionable safety record as early as 2006, when it quietly decided to formulate a new, BPA-free liner. (Read about reassessing the dangers of BPA in plastics.)

“SIGG was one of the companies that profited from all the bad publicity over BPA,” says Elaine Shannon, editor in chief of the Environmental Working Group, an environmental science research and advocacy group in Washington. Shannon’s group urged SIGG last month to offer customers full refunds; SIGG declined. (See a quick guide to FDA regulations.)

To placate the masses, SIGG has agreed to exchange those older, BPA-laden bottles for new ones through Oct. 31, but I’m still feeling betrayed. Like many parents I know, a couple years ago I tossed all the baby bottles I had — and any suspect sippies too — and invested in SIGGs, which cost about $20 each.

The blogosphere is full of people like me who hopped on board the environmental, health-conscious bandwagon, only to find out we were going in the wrong direction. “I’m feeling kind of like I did when I found out that John Edwards cheated on his wife,” Kellie Sloan Brown wrote on her blog, GreenHab: The Browns Go Green. “It isn’t the worst thing to ever happen in this world, but I still feel really disappointed because I thought SIGG to be a genuinely green company.”

SIGG has been around for more than 100 years, but it’s been fairly recently that its bottles have popped up everywhere, with everyone. Much of its popularity can be traced to research publicized in 2007 about BPA’s questionable safety. Since then, Chicago, Connecticut and Michigan have restricted the chemical, and more than 20 states are considering similar bans. The Environmental Protection Agency has placed BPA on a priority review list.

Nena Baker feels particularly duped; she switched to SIGG while researching her book The Body Toxic: How the Hazardous Chemistry of Everyday Things Threatens Our Health and Well-Being. After having given the bottles as gifts to friends and family, Baker, whose book came out last year, is now accusing SIGG of “greenwashing.”(Read “Going Green Just Got More Cost-Effective.”)

The consumer uproar has been eye-opening for SIGG CEO Steve Wasik. He thought going green just meant being good to the earth; he didn’t realize it meant fessing up too. “Being a green company also means being held to the highest degree of corporate transparency,” he wrote in an e-mail. “I fully expect that SIGG will not let consumers down in the future.”

So how can you tell which lining you’ve got? Peer inside your bottle. If it’s a shiny coppery-bronze, it’s the old, BPA-infused liner. If it’s a pale matte yellow, you’ve got the EcoCare liner, a new powder-based, co-polyester, water-based liner that SIGG says is 100% BPA- and phthalate-free.

Question is, do we believe the company this time?

Think of omega-3s as the oils that keep our brains and hearts from getting rusty. Hundreds of studies show that these essential fatty acids can help prevent cardiovascular disease and some scientists believe they are also beneficial for the brain and nervous system. But not all omega-3s are created equal. The ones with the biggest health benefits are found in fish like salmon and mackerel, which have the two long chain fatty acids docosahexaenoic (DHA) and eicosapentaenoic (EPA). Plant-derived omega-3s — the fatty acids found in flax seeds, olive oil and some leafy greens — don’t contain these specific fatty acid chains. While they’re also thought to be good for the heart, they don’t have quite the same effect on the body as their fish-derived cousins.

“Both types of omega-3s are essential for our health because the body cannot make them on its own. [But] people who regularly consume fish have less chance of dying from heart disease. For plant-derived omega-3s, the suggestive evidence is unconvincing and more research needs to be done to make stronger claims,” says Dariush Mozaffarian, an assistant professor of medicine and epidemiology at Harvard Medical School. (See the top 10 food trends of 2008.)

The difference between the two groups of omega-3s is now at the heart of a debate in the European Union. In 2007, the European Parliament passed a law allowing companies to tout the health benefits of omega-3s on their food products without having to differentiate between the plant-derived and fish-derived kinds. With the trial period due to expire in January 2010, the European Commission, the body that recommends which legislation will go before the Parliament, approved a proposal in October to make the statute permanent. The Parliament will decide on the issue in January.

Some experts are wary of the proposal, though. A group of 20 scientists from seven countries who specialize in fatty acids have warned it could allow food manufacturers to deceive consumers. They say that without clear labels, companies can use plant-derived omega-3s in their products and pass them off as the superior, fish-derived omega-3s. “They would be able to pour in cheap plant oils, but imply that they deliver the same health benefits as fish oils,” says John Stein, a neurophysiology professor at Oxford University and one of the scientists urging the European Parliament to vote against the proposal and instead set up a scientific committee to advise on omega-3 food labeling. (See nine kid foods to avoid.)

Thanks to a love affair with French fries and cheeseburgers — not fish and vegetables — most Westerners’ diets don’t contain enough omega-3s. On top of that, we eat too many processed foods, which contain another fatty acid that hinders the body’s ability to absorb omega-3s. This is one reason why food manufacturers have started putting more omega-3s into foods like margarine, mayonnaise and eggs in recent years.

Unilever, which sells margarine containing omega-3s, insists that its labels are accurate. The Anglo-Dutch company makes two different types of margarine, both of which it says are healthy. It produces margarine with omega-3 plant oils for vegetarians and margarine with omega-3 fish oils for people who eat fish, clearly stating on the labels which type of fatty acids are in each spread. “It’s not a competition between these different omega-3s — all are essential for the diet, ” says Anne Heughan, Unilever’s director of external affairs for Europe. Moreover, she says, Unilever is within the guidelines set by the European Food and Safety Authority (EFSA) on nutritional labeling. (See a special report on the science of appetite.)

But the scientists say the EFSA guidelines only deal with a product’s health claims about omega-3s, not its nutritional content. “We’ve got two types of claims in play at the same time. Health claims are about the effect on the eater, nutrition claims are about what is in the food. Pointing to the health claims alone is technically legal, but substantively misleading,” says Jack Winkler, a professor at the Metropolitan University of London and another of the scientists who is against the E.U. law.

The debate hasn’t reached the same level of specificity in the U.S. The Food and Drug Administration has given food companies the freedom to tout the health benefits of omega-3s without differentiating between the plant-derived and fish-derived kinds. Instead of worrying about food labels, scientists there are questioning whether the omega-3 benefits of fish consumption outweigh the risks of getting too much mercury. The FDA has taken a tough stance, advising women who are pregnant, nursing mothers and young children to avoid eating fish that is high in mercury, such as swordfish, king mackerel and tilefish, and to limit consumption of albacore tuna to six ounces per week. (Read: “The Hunt for Tuna: A Tough Catch.”)

The decision is now left to the European Parliament to decide what people across the continent will see on their tubs of margarine in the morning. Chances are, many people are probably unaware that their margarine evenhas health benefits. There’s still the small matter of educating the public about the health benefits of omega-3s in the first place.

Read: “Eat Your Heart Out.”

See TIME’s health and medicine covers.