It's not the birds' fault they're catching the bug!

[Rainbow]

Viva! have an interesting online factsheet about avian flu, here's a tweet link to it! :ducks: (http://www.viva.org.uk/campaigns/chickens/brdflu_factsheet.html)

[Rainbow]

Just found another link of interest...
Farm Sanctuary News (http://www.farmsanctuary.org/newsletter/Avain_flu.htm):owl: :luvbird: :peacock: :chick: :hummingbird:

[Oracl]

Thanks, Rainbow! :)

[Tiggerwoos]

Interesting stuff. Thanks for those links Rainbow.

[Rainbow]

It seems humans are going for the usual, head under the carpet, method of dealing with bird flu - murder the supposid carrier.

[Bowwowmeow]

'Biosecurity' Is Buzzword Vs. Bird Flu



http://my.eimg.net/harvest_xml/NEWS/img/20060421/444858c0_3ca7_1552720060421451007283.jpg (http://enews.earthlink.net/article/pho?guid=20060421/444858c0_3ca7_1552720060421451007283&article_path=/article/bus&article_guid=20060422/4449aa40_3421_1334520060422-1122050062)
A barbed wire fence is shown separating chicken egg laying facilities at the J.S. West Milling Co. egg laying plant in Hilmar, Calif. BEN MARGOT

By SCOTT LINDLAW
From Associated Press
April 22, 2006 1:01 PM EDT
HILMAR, Calif. - Tom Silva's chickens pump out 1.4 million eggs a day, but his operation looks more like a prison than a farm.
To reach his hen houses, an intruder would have to scale eight-foot fences topped by razor wire, then sneak past surveillance cameras.
"Biosecurity" is the buzzword du jour at chicken, turkey and egg operations across the country. A bird flu pandemic sweeping through flocks in Southeast Asia and beyond has spurred American commercial farmers to tighten their defenses.
"This is certainly the biggest issue facing the industry today, no question about that," said Richard Lobb, spokesman for the National Chicken Council.
The stakes are especially high in California, where a $2.5 billion poultry industry ranks among the top 10 producers nationwide for dinner chicken, turkey and table egg output. State officials say migratory bird routes that stretch southward from the Bering Strait and down the West Coast could bring the disease by this summer.
A tradition of raising "backyard chickens" for eggs, meat, cockfighting and bird shows runs deep in some Asian and Hispanic subcultures here in the Central Valley. Industry executives and state officials say these backyard birds number in the millions, and they worry these birds out in the open could be exposed to sick migrating flocks.
Then they could pass the disease to their owners - many of whom work at commercial poultry operations.
And there is painful precedent here. An outbreak of Exotic Newcastle disease killed more than 3.1 million birds, mostly poultry, in Southern California in 2002 and 2003.
Silva, vice president of the valley's J.S. West Milling Co., is as concerned about human carriers walking into his four facilities as he is about keeping sick birds out.
"If it gets into our industry, the only way to get it out is to euthanize complete complexes like this," he said during a tour of an egg-laying operation whose 1.5 million hens alone he valued at nearly $10 million.
The tour was brief, because no outsiders are allowed beyond the "STOP: BIOSECURE AREA" sign and razor wire - not even the lab workers who collect blood samples once a month for disease testing. They too are on Silva's payroll.
Even the short tour provided striking evidence of the measures the poultry industry is taking to combat bird flu before it reaches America.
Today, all trucks entering and exiting Silva's complex get an automated bath of ammonia-based disinfectant. Incoming drivers are asked where they've been and whether they've been exposed to poultry.
Every employee enters the site through a "dirty door" into a trailer that serves as a changing room. They swap their street clothes for pre-washed boots, hats and coveralls, then enter the hen houses through a "clean door." They reverse the process on the way out.
Various poultry companies even try to avoid each other on the road. They plot routes and stagger deliveries throughout the day, on the premise that the virus might jump from truck to truck.
The big rigs that rumble through the Central Valley most often bear the colorful logo of Foster Farms, which supplies dinner chickens primarily to California, Oregon and Washington consumers.
Foster Farms is taking a different approach with its "broiler"-raising farms. One of its facilities, the 120-acre Gurr Ranch, is not ringed by razor wire or even fencing. The hen houses are padlocked, and outsiders are not welcome, but the real emphasis is on making the ranch as repulsive as possible to migrating birds.
The resulting landscape looks like a moon base, intentionally devoid of trees and ponds but colonized by 64 identical outbuildings that house nearly 1.3 million chickens.
Migrating birds are looking for food, water and shelter, said Charles Corsiglia, an avian veterinarian on the staff of Livingston, Calif.-based Foster Farms, the biggest poultry company in the West.
"If we make our farms so that they don't have those things as they're flying over, they say, 'You know, that looks like a really bad place to land, because there's nowhere for me to waddle around,'" Corsiglia said. "'So I'm going to land at the dairy, or the canal.'"
Like the J.S. West Milling facility, the farm buildings are meant to be impenetrable by outside birds, though swallows flitted in and out of the eaves one recent morning. Corsiglia said these visitors can't get into the hen houses.
Every person must don disposable plastic boots before setting foot on the Gurr Ranch property. And truckers delivering feed are required to hose their rigs off with the same ammonia-based disinfectant used at J.S. West Milling.
It's all part of Corsiglia's three-part formula for biosecurity: isolating birds from disease, controlling people and equipment who come and go, and sanitizing everything.
"Animals that aren't exposed to disease don't get sick from those diseases," Corsiglia said. "The logic is so simple, it's laughable."
Exotic Newcastle hurt the industry, but forced it and the government to refine surveillance and response procedures, Corsiglia said.
U.S. Department of Agriculture officials believe farm workers who kept cockfighting roosters at home brought the disease to the egg farms where they worked. A quarantine on pet birds and commercial fowl in a 46,000-square-mile area spanning from Santa Barbara to San Diego cost federal and state agencies more than $151 million but kept the disease contained to Southern California.
"That was kind of like a dry run," Corsiglia said. "We never had it up here (in Northern California), which was actually very good because it showed the system really works."
Exotic Newcastle lingered for years in California during an outbreak in the 1970s, but the 2002-2003 outbreak was eradicated in less than a year, said Steve Lyle, a spokesman for the California Department of Food and Agriculture.
Silva keeps a brown foam chick in the center console of his truck. It's made for squeezing - a stress-buster.
He's not squeezing yet. Silva has invested $250,000 since 2002 in biosecurity measures. But like many in the industry, he worries that a Chicken Little, sky-is-falling panic may be his business' worst enemy.
"It's not in the United States. It's not even close to the United States," he said of bird flu. Tens of thousands of Americans die each year from "regular" flu, Silva said. "And we're worried about this bird flu?"
---
On the Net:
California Poultry Federation: http://www.cpif.org/

Call me paranoid, but is this bird flu scare starting to look like something designed to justify racism against Latinos and Asians, and to stamp out home grown animal "foods" so that no one will have any option other than to support the most brutal factory farms if they want to eat "their" meat? Moving away from the reality of living with the animals you intend to eat, and killing them yourself, can't be progress for the animals. My view, if everyone in the world will not go vegan, is that cheap, packaged animal body parts available in nice clean markets should be outlawed, along with the factory farms that produce them, and people who want to eat dead animals will have to keep them on their own premises and kill and butcher them themselves. No selling of already dead animals or their parts. If you want something from an animal, you must buy a live one and obtain whatever it is that you want from it yourself. This will not stop omnism entirely, as there are plenty of people doing this all over the world, but it sure would stop most "civilised" folks in Western countries from eating dead animals.
Factory farming is definitely taking a hit on account of PETA and others, so it looks to me as though they are trumping bird flu fear way out of proportion to justify the way they do things, and take the focus off of corporate evil, and shift it onto organic, free-range animal farming, which can't possibly be spraying ammonia all over the place if they want their organic certification, and onto poor non-whites who everyone likes to use as scapegoats for anything that is wrong with America anyway. It looks a lot less like "biosecurity" and a lot more like stamping out all competition, much in the same way Monsanto would like to put an end to all private and organic plant farming, and force the world to purchase all its food from Monsanto alone.

[Bowwowmeow]

Tests: Pigeons Don't Pose Bird Flu Trouble


http://my.eimg.net/harvest_xml/NEWS/img/20060423/444afbc0_3ca7_1552720060423633141326.jpg (http://enews.earthlink.net/article/pho?guid=20060423/444afbc0_3ca7_1552720060423633141326&article_path=/article/hea&article_guid=20060423/444afbc0_3421_13345200604231632955225)
A pigeon holds a scrap of food thrown by Laurence Rosen at the Daley Plaza in Chicago in this July 20, 2004, file photo. Pigeons don't pose a big risk of spreading bird flu, scientists say. M. SPENCER GREEN



By JOHN HEILPRIN (Associated Press Writer)
From Associated Press
April 23, 2006 9:26 AM EDT
WASHINGTON - City folks, don't worry. Nobody expects pigeons, more common than manhole covers, will bring the deadly bird flu virus. Pigeons are not immune from the virus. But tests indicate the birds pick it up only when they are exposed to very high doses, do not always become infected under those conditions and are carriers only briefly.
"Pigeons aren't a big worry," said Rex Sohn, a wildlife disease specialist at the U.S. Geological Survey's National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wis. "But to make absolute predictions that pigeons won't be susceptible to this virus, in whatever form it arises in North America, is not something you want to say."
Government scientists looking for the first signs of the H5N1 bird flu strain in the United States are focusing on wild migratory birds, not resident birds such as pigeons, starlings and sparrows that stay close to home.
In February, a 14-year-old pigeon seller in Iraq died after coming down with bird flu-like symptoms. Authorities said three of his cousins also were hospitalized with similar symptoms.
There have been no pigeon die-offs in parts of the world experiencing H5N1 outbreaks, according to USGS wildlife disease specialist Grace McLaughlin.
Three studies since the late 1990s by the Agriculture Department's Southeast Poultry Research Laboratory in Athens, Ga., have produced "more questions than we have answers," said the center's director, David Swayne. The lab has been working on bird flu since the 1970s.
In one experiment, researchers squirted into pigeons' mouths liquid drops that contained the highly pathogenic H5N1 virus from a Hong Kong sample. The birds got about 100 to 1,000 times the concentration that wild birds would encounter in nature. "We couldn't infect the pigeons," Swayne said. "So that's good news."
In 2004, the lab did two more experiments. Using a pigeon and a crow that had both died in Thailand, researchers gave 12 pigeons similarly high doses of the bird flu virus. Seven became infected and one died. Five others did not become infected.
"What that tells us is that pigeons can be susceptible. But they're not uniformly susceptible," Swayne said. "Not like chickens or ducks - they all become infected."
Infected pigeons carried the virus about 10 days. But they were infectious for only about two days and then at levels below what it would normally take to infect a chicken.
"The experimental data is not very strong that pigeons are going to be spreading this virus around," Swayne said. "At this point they have not been implicated in spreading it to humans and to farms."
---
On the Net:
Agricultural Research Service: http://www.ars.usda.gov/main
National Wildlife Health Center: http://www.nwhc.usgs.gov

So who is spreading it around? Is this a wild threat, or something cooked up in a lab?
Lucky pigeons. With how much they are hated already, they don't need another reason for people to call them "flying rats". "Flying humans" would be more appropriate as an insult, anyway.

[Oracl]

The future really looks quite bleak a lot of the time. :(

[Fauxmage]

My new book and website:
BIRD FLU: A VIRUS OF OUR OWN HATCHING (hardcover, 465 pages)
http://www.BirdFluBook.org


My newsletter started out monthly, turned quarterly, and now this is the first issue since Fall 2005! What have I been doing all year?


When millions of people were duped onto the Atkins Diet I felt the need to drop everything and write perhaps the most comprehensive analysis to date on how unscientific, ineffective, and downright dangerous those low carb diets could be. I collected all the best research, testimony from all the best experts and wrote the book Carbophobia, and put the entire thing free, full-text, online at http://www.AtkinsExposed.org. The Atkins Corporation dropped their threats to sue when they declared bankruptcy 5 months after publication :). I hadn't planned on writing it, but there was just so much misinformation, and so many people were placed at risk that I felt forced to. My life over the last year has similarly been side-swiped by the threat of bird flu triggering a global pandemic of human disease.


So I wrote another book, Bird Flu: A Virus of Our Own Hatching, and again placed the entire thing free, full-text, online, at http://www.BirdFluBook.org. The hardcover will not be officially released for a few weeks (though definitely in time for you to get everyone you know copies for the holidays), but if you just can't wait you can order sneak preview copies at www.HumaneSocietyPress.org.
As always all the proceeds I receive from the sales of all my books goes to charity.


Bird Flu is my prescription for preventing, preparing for, and surviving the next flu pandemic. Leading public health authorities now predict as inevitable a pandemic of influenza, triggered by bird flu and expected to lead to millions of deaths around the globe. But the influenza virus has existed for millions of years as an innocuous intestinal virus of wild ducks. What turned a harmless waterborne duck virus into a killer? That's the question I attempted to answer. The book is practical too, explaining what we can do to protect our families and what society can do to reduce the likelihood of such potential catastrophes in the future. As with all my work, I've tried to make it engaging (a real page-turner!) and entertaining (funny too!). I am just so excited to share it with everyone; I think it's the best--and most important--work of my life.


This new book, of course, means I'm back on the road. I've put together just a stunning multimedia presentation that I hope everyone will be able to catch. My list of speaking dates is also up at htp://www.BirdFluBook.org


Please help me get this critical information out there. A pandemic, by very definition, threatens everyone, but the goal is to be prepared, not scared. There are simple things we can do right now to protect ourselves and our communities. So check out http://www.BirdFluBook.org and if you find it useful please help me spread the word. And maybe this time it won't be the Atkins Corporation suing me, it will be Kentucky Fried Chicken :)


I do hope to get back to the nutrition newsletter eventually--thank you all for your patience. For the issue archive, go to http://www.DrGreger.org/newsletters.html
-Michael


--
Michael Greger, M.D.
Director, Public Health and Animal Agriculture
The Humane Society of the United States
2100 L St., N.W.
Washington, DC 20037
Direct line: (301) 258-3110
Fax: (301) 258-3081
http://www.BirdFluBook.org

[Oracl]

I just had a quick look at http://www.BirdFluBook.org and it's quite sobering. I guess I just feel humans have brought this on themselves and I don't worry about it nearly as much as I worry about the cruelty to animals going on around me, every day, relentlessly. :(

[Fauxmage]

I just read an article about a new strain of Super Tuberculosis that is drug resistant. I know it sounds cruel, but I see this all as "Mother Nature's" attempt to control our growth and deadly parasitism because we refuse to. I read another article yesterday about Tony Blair (of all people) condemning Bush for his "wait and see" global warming policy. The article predicted that within our lifetimes we will see a global economic disaster just like the Great Depression in the thirties, because of climate change altering our economies for the worst. We are bringing it on ourselves, and its the fault of the common people as much as it is our leaders', because we let them get away with what they are doing.

I know the alternatives to population control are controversial. Its difficult to decide, if we are going to seriously reduce the birth rate, who gets to have babies and who doesn't, if say, for example, only one in ten or twenty couples is allowed to have children. But is it better to let some mindless disease do it for us? Is it preferable to stand by and watch those who are already here catch diseases and die from them, instead of prevent them from being born in the first place? I don't have the answers, myself, but I know that "Mother Nature" does, and pretty soon she is going to win the race. I just hate to think of all the species we are taking out with us on our way to the next big extinction event.

[1vegan]

I guess I just feel humans have brought this on themselves and I don't worry about it nearly as much as I worry about the cruelty to animals going on around me, every day, relentlessly. :(

I think we humans brought this on ourselves too.

There's so much use of anti-biotics in raising animals for consumption, it's gotta go wrong sometime.

[Keykeypie]

Frightening.....because it all makes complete sense.....

[KRITER]

Its reveng from the birds and nature.