As reports of swine flu fill the news the pork industry is up in arms over the name fearing a drop in sale of pork.

There is no evidence so far that the people who are becoming sick were in contact with pigs and medical authorities have said that people cannot get the swine flu from eating properly cooked pork. Several nations however have stopped supply of pork from the United States and Mexico as fears over the flu spreading to newer countries is in the news.

Pedro de Camargo Neto, chairman of the Brazilian Industry Association of Pork Meat Production and Exports, adopted the term "Mexican flu". He has written to Margaret Chan, director general of the World Health Organization (WHO) to stop referring to the latest outbreak as “swine flu” as it is misleading people into believing that they can contract it through contact or consumption of pork products without any scientific grounds.

"Swine are not infected and are not the vector of the disease. There is not one pig identified in Mexico (as infected with the strain)," he said.

"The misinformation comes from the name. That is why we call it Mexican flu," he said, adding the issue distracted people from focusing on the person-to-person infection through which it has spread.

The U.S. Farm Bureau Federation has called for the disease to be renamed North American influenza "in keeping with a long standing medical tradition of naming influenza pandemics (after) the regions where they were identified.” It suggested "hybrid influenza" as an alternative.

“Swine flu is a misnomer,” said C. Larry Pope, the chief executive of Smithfield Foods. “They need to be concerned about influenza, but not eating pork.”

Despite all the assurances a pork panic seems to have hit the world with several countries on Tuesday announcing that they were banning some or all pork products from the United States and to date, countries including the Philippines, Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Ecuador have banned pork from the United States, with Mexican pork exports also covered by most of those bans. China banned pork from certain states, and Russia banned all meat imports, not just pork, from certain states.

Officials say the challenge, is persuading those countries to reverse the restrictions so they do not become permanent. Allen F. Johnson, a former chief agriculture trade negotiator for the United States trade representative and now a consultant said, “If you don’t reverse bad policy quickly, people get used to it.”

Based on its genetic structure researchers say that the new virus is undoubtedly a type of swine influenza, derived originally from a strain that lived in pigs however experts are still determining how long ago it infected pigs and how much it might have mutated when it jumped to humans.

“It’s fair to say that at some point the virus passed through a pig,” said Dr. Paul A. Offit, an infectious disease expert at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “It could have been months; it could have been years ago.”

Experts concluded to say that even if pigs were the original source of the disease, they were not involved in its transmission now. The virus is passing from person to person, they said, most likely by the spread of respiratory droplets.