Tag: H5N1
Avian Flu is Coming: Hide the Chickens Indoors
By cgfi | November 21, 2007
By: Dennis T. Avery and Alex A. Avery
CHURCHVILLE, VA—It’s time to quit playing the “organic and free-range” poultry game. Organic and free range birds carry higher bacterial risks—and now we know they could spread a deadly human flu pandemic.
British authorities have just confirmed a new outbreak of the virulent H5N1 strain of “bird flu” at a free-range poultry farm in eastern England. This avian flu has already killed more than 200 people across Asia, and millions of birds. The virus mutated through the close interaction between humans and domestic poultry in Asian villages and rice paddies. Wild birds then caught the new virus from the domestic poultry and have spread it to Europe and Africa. We’re probably next.
The Brits have already ordered the slaughter of the 6,000 free-range birds at the English farm. They’ve also ordered all domestic birds “isolated from contact with wild birds.” That means putting them indoors.
Authorities are dreading the possibility that this flu will mutate into an even worse form that could pass from people to people. This sequence caused the infamous Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918–1919, which killed more than 50 million people. The disease infected 20 percent of the whole world’s population. Our milder yearly flu epidemics are mostly dangerous to the elderly, the very young, and those with compromised immune systems. The 1918 pandemic instead killed mostly healthy young adults, causing economic and emotional disaster to vast numbers of families.
Spanish Flu survivors said they felt as though they had been beaten all over their bodies by baseball bats. Victims bled from their ears, noses, stomachs and intestines, and then died from bacterial pneumonia induced by the flu.
Most of humanity’s epidemic diseases have been created by the intimate relationship between us and our domestic animals. Microorganisms and viruses mutate back and forth between species, trying out new modes of attack. Historically, we got smallpox from cows; cholera from hogs; yellow fever—and, apparently, AIDS—from monkeys.
Our flu epidemics still evolve in Asia, where billions of chickens and ducks live side-by-side with billions of people in the villages and rice paddies. The World Health Organization is urging Asia to put its domestic poultry indoors.
In Germany, when authorities banned outdoor birds, organic farmers demanded an exemption to provide the “outdoor play-time” required under their special rules. German authorities relented, and said the organic birds could be outdoors so long as they were covered by net. Nets, of course, will do nothing to keep wild bird droppings from spreading the flu virus to domestic flocks. Then the disease can be spread across the countryside in the meat of the slaughtered birds. Duck meat can transmit the disease even if the live ducks showed no disease symptoms.
The organic game has been fun, and affluent consumers have enjoyed pretending that their chickens and ducks were “healthier” than the ordinary chickens and ducks purchased by their less wealthy and chic fellow citizens. In fact, the indoor birds are more comfortable than their free-range cousins because they’re protected from hot sun and fierce winter. They also suffer less predation from hawks and owls, and commit less cannibalism on each other. Most importantly, however, indoor birds are unlikely to get or spread the flu to each other, or to us.
That “free range” label chicken on your restaurant chicken or duck is mainly an excuse to charge more for the meal. Let’s give up that little thrill of “ignorant superiority” and protect our fellow Americans with birds that are protected from the avian flu. Keep them indoors.
DENNIS T. AVERY is a senior fellow for Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C. and is the Director for Center for Global Food Issues (www.cgfi.org). He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. ALEX A. AVERY is the Director of Research at the Hudson Institute’s Center for Global Food Issues. Readers may write them at Post Office Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421.
Posted in Commentary |No Comments »