"It is being passed on from human to human. You'd be safer kissing a pig than your partner," he said, adding with a chuckle: "I went out and pashed a few of the pigs this morning."

If there is a tinge of desperation in his dry humour it is borne of three hard years for the industry, in which the number of breeding sows has shrunk by about 20 per cent because of the high dollar and high grain prices.

But Mr Pollard is fastidious about cleanliness. It begins each day at 7am, when his 12 staff arrive for work.

They scrub down and change into clean clothes.

"About the only thing that stays with them is their underwear, so I supply them with socks, boots, shorts, overalls, T-shirts, wet-weather gear," Mr Pollard said.

Visitors are quizzed on their health and barred from the piggery near Young if they have had recent contact with livestock.

But the standards, which have ensured that Australia's industry has been immune from any disease scare, have been overshadowed by the swine flu outbreak.

Farmers such as Mr Pollard now fear they will become "collateral damage".

"Midweek we start marking pigs for the following week and we've noticed a considerable drop-off in demand," he said.

"People have said, 'look we don't need the number that we had the week before' and they're wanting to push the price down."

Australian Pork chief executive Andrew Spencer said sales were likely to suffer.

"Some of the indications we are getting from little straw polls being done online are telling us that somewhere between one in four and one in five people will think twice about purchasing pork while this disease is around.

"That's enough for this to be quite devastating on our industry," he said.

Almost 20 nations have banned pork imports from the US and Mexico.

Hog futures are down 7.5 per cent since the first deaths, reported on April 24.