[Mb-civic] The price of cheap chicken is bird flu

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

The price of cheap chicken is bird flu
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/sunday/commentary/la-op-
orent12mar12,0,6380375.story?coll=la-sunday-commentary
By Wendy Orent, WENDY ORENT is the author of "Plague: The 
Mysterious Past and Terrifying Future of the World's Most Dangerous 
Disease."
March 12, 2006 
CHICKEN HAS never been cheaper. A whole one can be bought for 
little more than the price of a Starbucks cup of coffee. 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. 

ADVERTISEMENT 
 
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 still 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 last 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 are often 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 or dead 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% 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 U.S. 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. 


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"A war of aggression is the supreme international crime." -- Robert Jackson,
 former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice and Nuremberg prosecutor

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