Bird Flu Pandemic : Are We Hatching Our Own Destruction?

A story from JAMA about the excellent book by Michael Greger, Bird Flu: A Virus Of Our Own Hatching, focuses on one of its more disturbing conclusions about the rapid spread of H5N1 and how our industrialized poultry farming practices are complicit in the repeated outbreaks :

Greger, Director of Public Health and Animal Agriculture at the Humane Society of the United States, discusses how human mistreatment of animals has actually backfired, with factory farming making livestock more susceptible to disease. He explains how modern livestock production facilitates the transmission and evolution of avian influenza and argues convincingly that the right environment for a virus such as H5N1 to thrive now exists.

The message is that pandemics are not born but rather are man-made—and that there is a price to pay for the modern poultry industry, in which fowl are raised in closed, stressful, unhealthy facilities, facilitating mutation and dissemination of the bird flu virus. Greger writes that "[It] may take a pandemic with a virus like H5N1 before the world realizes the true cost of cheap chicken."

There remains room for hope. As Greger states in the Introduction, "[if] changes in human behaviour can cause new plagues, changes in human behaviour may prevent them in the future." A radical change from factory farming to less intensive methods including free-range farming is needed, especially in the poultry industry, in which "humanity must shift toward raising poultry in smaller flocks, under less stressful, less crowded and more hygienic conditions, with outdoor access."

The JAMA story also highlights a few startling facts and estimates from US Centres For Disease Control And Prevention data :

...in a normal flu season some 200 000 individuals in the United States are hospitalized and 38 000 die of influenza, mostly elderly persons, with annual direct medical costs and lost productivity calculated at $12 billion.

However, these figures pale before the catastrophe implied by a severe influenza pandemic. The CDC predicts that a medium-level epidemic would affect a third of the US population, hospitalize 734 000, and kill almost 210 000.

With failure to produce an effective vaccine and with a virus untouched by anti-influenza drugs, an epidemic of the H5N1 avian influenza via person-to-person transmission could wreak havoc. With a probable 80 million disease episodes, a 20% mortality rate would result in 16 million deaths. The human tragedy and economic upheaval would be unprecedented.

Read The Full Story Here

Poultry Industry Gets Nervous About 'Invisible' Bird Flu

World Poultry has run a short update on the 'invisible' bird flu strain now infecting chickens in Indonesia, where some bird have been found to be infected with H5N1, but are not ill, and show no outward symptoms of infection :

Indonesia has found traces of the highly pathogenic bird flu in healthy-looking poultry. This creates a major obstacle in detecting the disease.

Clinical signs of bird flu range from respiratory distress to coughing and sneezing, to dead chickens. If no clinical signs can be observed – asymptomatic chickens - the risks of the virus spreading are much higher, which also means that humans can become more easily infected with bird flu due to the virus's ability to adapt to new environments and hosts.

"The poultry death rate is not so high, but there is a trend that chicken or poultry are infected by the virus but they don't die," says Musny Suatmodjo, director of animal health.

Hong Kong-based researchers have also detected such "asymptomatic" chickens and other poultry in mainland Chinese markets in recent years, which they believe were responsible for most of the H5N1 human infections there.

Taking into account reports yesterday that Indonesia's 80th bird flu victim died after eating infected chicken meat, the 'invisible bird flu' development means that entire poultry stocks will need to be regularly tested, or vaccinated, and poultry meat will have to undergo more rigorous inspections and testing before it reaches the marketplace, particularly in countries like Indonesia where H5N1 is already at epidemic levels in bird populations.

Should a wave of human bird flu deaths as a result of eating infected poultry, poultry that showed no symptomatic signs of infection by the virus, the impact on domestic poultry sales, and exports, will be devastating.

The largest poultry companies around the world have mounted aggressive PR and marketing campaigns, costing tens of millions of dollars, to ensure consumers that they cannot become infected with the H5N1 virus from eating chicken or duck meat. A usual added proviso is that the meat is safe if "properly cooked".

In early 2006, Vietnam mounted a huge poster and advertising campaign warning poultry consumers that they needed to boil poultry meat until it was yellow before it should be considered safe to eat.

There has been at least three deaths believed to have resulted from eating infected poultry in as many months.

Marketing and PR alone will not assure the public this food product is safe if deaths continue.