DES MOINES, Iowa • Like the virus itself, the name “swine flu” is spreading quickly. For the pork purveyors and hog farmers who make up the nation’s $15 billion pork industry, that’s a disaster.

It doesn’t seem to matter that the strain may not come entirely from pigs and cannot be spread by eating pork. Hog prices are already dropping, as financial markets worry people will have second thoughts about buying “the other white meat.”

“It’s killing our markets,” said Francis Gilmore, 72, who runs a 600-hog operation in Perry, outside Des Moines, and worries his small business could be ruined by the crisis.

“Where they got the name, I just don’t know.”

The swine-flu strain that is spreading is a new hybrid of human, swine and bird flu but is widely known as swine flu. Though it is suspected of killing more than 150 people in Mexico, public-health officials have said eating products such as bacon, ham and pork chops is safe, as long as the meat is cooked thoroughly.

Still, the outbreak has depressed the U.S. pork industry. China, Russia and the Ukraine have banned pork imports from Mexico and parts of the United States, and the outbreak has stalled the usual spring rise in U.S. hog prices.

Hog prices nationwide had dropped to an average of about $59 per 100 pounds Tuesday morning, down from about $62 last Thursday, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Prices typically climb past $70 in late April and May.

“It is an unfortunate use of words,” said Dave Warner, a spokesman for the National Pork Producers Council. “It does trouble us from that standpoint because it’s very much a public-health issue right now, and there’s no indication that a pig gave it to a human. To call it a swine flu, I think, is a little bit misleading.”

U.S. officials said Tuesday that they may abandon the term swine flu, for fear it’s confusing people into thinking they could catch it from pork.

“We’re discussing, is there a better way to describe this that would not lead to inappropriate actions on people’s part?” said Dr. Richard Besser, acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The European Union’s health commissioner has suggested the virus be renamed “novel flu.”

MaryBeth Winstead, who was shopping at a Harris Teeter supermarket in Raleigh, N.C., said she probably wouldn’t be putting pork on her grocery list, as the outbreak unfolds.

“I haven’t really done a lot of research on it yet,” the 44-year-old Winstead said. “We normally take caution. But it’s not like I’m going to cook it anytime soon.”

At a Kroger store in Charleston, W.Va., Sondra Meadows, 69, loaded two packages of pork chops into her shopping cart. “Once it’s cooked, I don’t see how it could possibly hurt anyone,” she said.

To put customers at ease, hog producers have ramped up efforts to show that their operations are clean. That includes urging farmers to increase hand washing, restrict visitors, block outside clothing from being worn near the animals, preventing birds from interacting with pigs and separating hogs that come from multiple sites.

But it might be too late to shut the barn door on the term “swine flu.”

“It’s just a very negative, onerous and really incorrect appellation that we’re going to have to live with,” Dr. Tom Ray, a veterinarian and North Carolina director of livestock health.

Palmer and Adriana Wojakowska host a tennis regional. Photo by CHRISTIAN MURDOCK, THE GAZETTE