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"Blame Big Chicken Farms for B.F. Threat"

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    Posted: March 19 2006 at 5:03am
March 19, 2006, 1:41AM

Blame Big Chicken Farms for Bird Flu Threat

Lethal virus is a product of the industrial poultry trade


March 19, 2006, 1:41AM Chron.com

"Chicken has never been cheaper. A whole one can be bought for little
more than the price of a cup of coffee from Starbucks. But the industrial
farming methods that make ever-cheaper chicken possible may also have
created the lethal strain of bird flu virus, H5N1, that threatens to set off a
global pandemic.

According to Earl Brown, a University of Ottawa flu virologist, lethal bird
flu is entirely man-made, first evolving in commercially produced poultry
in Italy in 1878. The highly pathogenic H5N1 is descended from a strain
that first appeared in Scotland in 1959.

People have been living with backyard flocks of poultry since the dawn of
civilization. But it wasn't until poultry production became modernized,
and birds were raised in much larger numbers and concentrations, that a
virulent bird flu evolved. When birds are packed close together, any
brakes on virulence are off. Birds struck with a fatal illness can easily pass
the disease to others, through direct contact or through fecal matter, and
lethal strains can evolve. Somehow, the virus that arose in Scotland found
its way to China, where, as H5N1, it has been raging for more than a
decade.

Industrial poultry-raising moved from the West to Asia in the past few
decades and has begun to supplant backyard flocks there. According to a
recent report by Grain, an international nongovernmental organization,
chicken production in Southeast Asia has jumped eightfold in 30 years to
about 2.7 million tons. The Chinese annually produce about 10 million
tons of chickens. Some of China's factory farms raise 5 million birds at a
time. Charoen Pokphand Group, a huge Thai enterprise that owns a large
chunk of poultry production throughout Thailand and China as well as in
Indonesia, Cambodia, Vietnam and Turkey, exported about 270 million
chickens in 2003 alone.

Since then, the C.P. Group, which styles itself as the "Kitchen of the
World," has suffered enormous losses from bird flu. According to bird-flu
expert Gary Butcher of the University of Florida, the company has made a
conscientious effort to clean up. But the damage has been done.

Virulent bird flu has left the factories and moved into the farmyards of the
poor, where it has had devastating effects. Poultry may represent a
family's greatest wealth. The birds often are not eaten until they die of
old age or illness. The cost of the virus to people who have raised birds
for months or years is incalculable and the compensation risible: In
Thailand, farmers have been offered one-third of their birds' value since
the outbreak of bird flu.

Sometimes farmers who don't want to lose their investments illicitly trade
their birds across borders. In Nigeria, virus-infected chickens threatened
with culling are sold by the poor to even poorer people, who see nothing
unusual in eating a sick bird. So the birds — and the bird flu virus — slip
away to other villages and other countries.

The Southeast Asian country without rampant bird flu is Laos, where 90
percent of poultry production is still in peasant hands, according to the
U.S. Department of Agriculture. About 45 small outbreaks in or near
commercial farms from January to March 2004 were quickly stamped out
by culling birds from contaminated farms.

Some researchers still blame migratory birds for the relentless spread of
the bird flu virus. But Martin Williams, a conservationist and bird expert in
Hong Kong, contends that wild birds are more often victims than carriers.
Last spring, for instance, about 5,000 wild birds died at Qinghai Lake in
western China, probably from exposure to disease at commercial poultry
farms in the region, according to Grain. The virus now in Turkey and
Nigeria is essentially identical to the Qinghai strain.


Richard Thomas of Birdlife International, a global alliance of conservation
organizations, and others dispute the idea that wild birds carried the flu
virus from Qinghai to Russia and beyond. They point out that the disease
spread from Qinghai to southern Siberia during the summer months when
birds do not migrate, and that it moved east to west along railway lines,
roads and international boundaries — not along migratory flyways.

What evidence there is for migratory birds as H5N1 carriers is contained
in a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences. Researchers examined 13,115 wild birds and found
asymptomatic bird flu in six ducks from China. Analysis showed that
these ducks had been exposed earlier to less virulent strains of H5 and
thus were partly immunized before they were infected with H5N1. On this
slender basis, coupled with the fact that some domestic ducks infected
for experimental purposes don't get sick, the study's authors contend
that the findings "demonstrate that H5N1 viruses can be transmitted over
long distances by migratory birds."

Even so, the researchers conceded that the global poultry trade, much of
which is illicit, plays a far larger role in spreading the virus. The Nigerian
government traced its outbreak to the illegal importation of day-old
chicks. Illegal trading in fighting cocks brought the virus from Thailand to
Malaysia in fall 2005. And it is probable that H5N1 first spread from
Qinghai to Russia and Kazakhstan last summer through the sale of
contaminated poultry.

But an increasingly hysterical world targets migratory birds. In early
February, a flock of geese, too cold and tired to fly, rested on the frozen
waters of the Danube Delta in Romania. A group of 15 men set upon
them, tossed some into the air, tore off others' heads and used still-living
birds as soccer balls. They said they did this because they feared the bird
flu would enter their village through the geese. Many conservationists
worry that what happened in Romania is a foreshadowing of the mass
destruction of wild birds.

Meanwhile, deadly H5N1 is washing up on the shores of Europe. Brown
says the commercial poultry industry, which caused the catastrophe in the
first place, stands to benefit most. The conglomerates will more and more
dominate the poultry-rearing business. Some experts insist that will be
better for us. Epidemiologist Michael Osterholm at the University of
Minnesota, for instance, contends that the "single greatest risk to the
amplification of the H5N1 virus, should it arrive in the United States
through migratory birds, will be in free-range birds ... often sold as a
healthier food, which is a great ruse on the American public."

The truly great ruse is that industrial poultry farms are the best way to
produce chickens — that Perdue Farms and Tyson Foods and Charoen
Pokphand are keeping the world safe from backyard poultry and
migratory birds. But what's going to be on our tables isn't the biggest
problem.

The real tragedy is what's happened in Asia to people who can't afford
cheap, industrial chicken. And the real victims of industrially produced,
lethal H5N1 have been wild birds, an ancient way of life and the poor of
the Earth, for whom a backyard flock has always represented a measure
of autonomy and a bulwark against starvation."

Orent is the author of "Plague: The Mysterious Past and Terrifying Future
of the World's Most Dangerous Disease." This article originally appeared
in the Los Angeles Times.

March 19, 2006, 1:41AM
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RicheeRich View Drop Down
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote RicheeRich Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: March 19 2006 at 5:08am
I will give up eating chicken before I turn my back yard into a chicken coup. Oh, yeah, I like beef and pork, too. I wonder how many eatable critters I can fit onto a third of an acre of land?
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote BenF Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: March 19 2006 at 6:09am
Dine with little, sup with less: Do better still, sleep supperless.
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote Guests Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: March 19 2006 at 6:38am

Quite frankly, I have no problem with eating well-cooked chicken (with or
without BF) now or in the future. The problem being, who wants the risk of
preparing the bird?

I'm a lot more uncomfortable eating beef, in light of news about Mad Cow
Disease ( Spongiform encephalopathy). At least the chicken virus you can kill
with heat. A Mad Cow prion can be nuked with hard gamma-rays for 1/2
hour and it still survives.
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote Mr Silkman Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: March 19 2006 at 6:53am
Do you remember those people who publicly ate chicken, proclaiming it safe to eat if it was cooked thoroughly?  And further stated that you can't get sick even from eating an infected chicken if it was cooked thoroughly.  All I could think of when reading about them was, I'll believe that only when they showed their chicken coming from a pile of culled chickens, and then ate it.

Until then........well, what would you suggest?
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote Guests Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: March 19 2006 at 7:57am
I do not think those people promoting chicken consumption should necessarily eat it on camera....they should slaughter and prepare it for consumption.  If they are ok doing that with a potentially sick bird, that would say a lot more to me...
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