Korean Job Discussion Forums

[EFLtrainer]

[Manner of Speaking]

[rapier]

As a reminder...

No wild bird has been found to infect a human, nor infect domestic poultry: of tens of thouands migrating birds strategically tested for HN51, the (single figure) handful testing positive were dead or dying- incapable of flight or spreading the disease, and often linked to sites where domestic poultry possibly infected them- commercial bird feed and faeces discharged into rivers etc.

What is also clear is that the solution, as already proven, lies in culling infected poultry around disease areas, and imposing strict controls on poultry and poultry meat imports.

[rapier]

Are high risk farming practices spreading avian flu?
18-01-2006

Much has been written in recent months about the role of wild birds in spreading the Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI) H5N1 virus. But there is a distinct lack of evidence to support these assertions.

Tens of thousands of apparently healthy wild birds have been tested for HPAI H5N1 over the last decade. According to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in November 2005: "To date extensive testing of clinically normal migratory birds in the infected countries has not produced any positive results for H5N1."

Does the westward spread of HPAI H5N1 from the origins of the current outbreak in China implicate wild birds? "No species migrates from Qinghai, China, west to Eastern Europe," says Dr Richard Thomas, BirdLife International's Communications Manager. "When plotted, the pattern of outbreaks follows major road and rail routes, not flyways. And the absence of outbreaks in Africa, South and South-East Asia and Australasia this autumn is hard to explain, if wild birds are the primary carriers."

Are other transmission methods plausible? Movement of infected poultry and poultry products is a likely cause of spread. South Korea and Japan are two countries to have suffered outbreaks of H5N1 in poultry and wild birds following importation of infected duck meat. Both countries stamped the virus out by culling infected poultry around disease areas, and imposed strict controls on poultry and poultry meat imports.

"Neither country has suffered a recurrence of the virus despite the influx each autumn of hundreds of thousands of wild migrant birds," Richard Thomas points out.

US experience in the 1980s with controlling an outbreak of H5N2-a strain of avian influenza non-infectious to people-in domestic poultry is relevant. A report found: "AI virus transmission was possible and occurred through movements of live and dead birds, contaminated equipment and vehicles, contaminated eggs, feed, water, insect vectors, and human vectors. In fact, any fomite that had contact with contaminated manure was capable of transmitting the virus. It was remarkably easy to isolate AI virus anywhere or from any inanimate object associated with an infected poultry flock."

Outbreaks at fish farms in Qinghai, Romania and Croatia may also be significant. The use of poultry manure as feed in fish-ponds appears to be widespread in east and south-east Asia and across Kazakhstan, southern Russia and west to Ukraine, Moldova and several eastern and central European countries. A joint FAO, WHO (World Health Organisation) and OIE (World organisation for animal health) conference in July 2005 reported: "In farming of poultry, high risk production practices include the farming of multiple species of animals, including poultry and waterfowl, within one farm unit; the keeping of chickens over fish ponds; the use of untreated chicken faeces as fertilizer or livestock feed..." The current advice on the FAO website warns: "the feeding of poultry manure/poultry litter should be banned in countries affected by or at risk from avian influenza, even if correctly composted, ensiled or dried with heat treatment." Manufacture and movement of fertiliser and feed in which the virus remains infective could be a very effective way of spreading H5N1 over long distances.

"The case against wild birds looks flimsy indeed. Few would disagree that better biosecurity is the key to halting the disease's spread," says Thomas.

http://www.birdlife.org/news/news/2006/01/flu_agriculture.html

[EFLtrainer]

Seems to me that any ad all possible vectors are involved. I always wonder at discussions that search for THE answer when, as with so many things in life, there are multiple facets to it.

I'm fairly comfortable with the idea that the primary source of spread to date has been due to the farming and sale of poultry. I would be very, very suprised if the source of H5N1 were not poultry - going back to '97 or whenever.

However, it seems logically obvious that as the virus spread, new vectors were created, which then multiplied. That all of the recent finds were in migratory birds, but few if any of the early finds were, would seem to support this. Assuming this conclusion is correct, where it started would apppar to be irrelevant from this point on. It's essentialy a chicken/egg issue: scientifically interesting, but in practice irrelevant.

It seems clear it is spreading through the old vectors and the new ones. As long as governments are willing and able to assist the farmers and provide alternate food sources where needed, this is not a huge human issue. The real fear is the possibility of pandemic, which I think can safely be said to grow with the spread of the disease. The greater the variety of interraction between the virus and various populations of avians and humans, the more likely significant mutations might occur.

What to do, what to do...

[Summer Wine]

This is a controversial statement and not one easily supported. But one that is raised by a number of post statements in the media. (Going back a few years).

Is it possible that we now have to "buy water as our water supplies are polluted(?)), Our local food stock is in danger of being infectious (mad cow disease)(bird flu)(etc).

None of this will impact on the long term supply of these products, just that we now have to buy bottled water, instead of drinking fresh/ we now have to buy commercial foods instead of growing our own/ we now have to pay premium supplies for our energy instead of using timber (renewable energy source).

I sometimes wonder how many of these problems are created ones or the result of a large businesses mistakes and how much has to do with reality. Or are we being herded in a certain direction and whether its the best one.

Its just a thought and educated people are trained to think for themselves, so I won't apologise for hypothosing.

[Manner of Speaking]

[Manner of Speaking]

[Hater Depot]

Well, Korea's got bird flu now. I guess kimchi could only protect us for so long.

Four Human Bird Flu Infections Confirmed

[some waygug-in]

[quote="Hater Depot"]Well, Korea's got bird flu now. I guess kimchi could only protect us for so long.

Four Human Bird Flu Infections Confirmed

[quote]Korea on Friday confirmed four infections with the deadly human strain of bird flu in the country.
The Korea Center for Disease Control and Prevention said the four tested positive for antibodies of the H5N1 strain of avian influenza but showed no symptoms of the disease, meaning their immune systems overcame the infection. The government stressed domestic chickens and ducks are safe to eat.

Exactly. The best defence is a healthy immune system.

http://www.mercola.com/2005/nov/15/finally_medical_journal_admits_the_truth_about_bird_flu.htm

Dr. Mercola's Comment:


Many enjoyed my breaking story on the connection of Donald Rumsfeld and the Bird Flu Hoax last month. It was one of the most read stories I have ever run. In fact it was widely passed around the internet and was posted by more than 100,000 websites. It even prompted CNN to pick up the story.

This is an update to the continuing bird flu saga. The drug companies got a multi-billion dollar pile of cash, and with the new legislation that was recently passed, they can't be sued no matter what they do, except for "willful misconduct", whatever that means.

This effectively allows them to collect a barrel of cash from this hoax and avoid any responsibility for the inevitable harm and damage that will result from their solution for this created villain.

Remember this is all for a pandemic that will likely never materialize. I am a former Boy Scout and fully believe in being prepared, however this is not even close to the recommendations made by experts to New Orleans prior to Hurricane Katrina, that if implemented would have saved 1,000 lives, 500,000 homes and well over $100 billion.

No, this is all about creating fear and panic to benefit the drug companies. Now, I am still not opposed to being prepared for this potential bird flu pandemic. It is POSSIBLE it just might materialize, highly unlikely, but certainly possible.

But if bird flu did develop as projected, there is no way that the flu vaccine or Tamiflu will mitigate its damage. No way!

If you want to know how to truly strengthen your immune system so you will laugh when the flu bug or nearly any other infectious agent seeks to infect you, then start following the Total Health Program or read the quick tips I posted last year:

First, start focusing on eating properly. That means avoiding:

Fast foods
Sugars
Grains
Trans-fats
Additionally you can increase the healthy and essential fats like the omega-3 fats found in fish and cod liver oil: Those of you who read the newsletter regularly know I'm a fan of the Carlson's brand of fish oil and cod liver oil, as I have seen clear and often substantial improvements in my patients who use it. Plus, Carlson's fish and cod liver oil is one of the few brands that put the extra vitamin E in it for you straight from the get-go, so you don't have to take extra vitamin E if you don't want to.

You can find Carlson's fish or cod liver oil at your local health food store, or, for your convenience, on my Recommended Products page section.

[EFLtrainer]

Hmmm... given the 50 percent death rate, what is the government of Korea hiding?

[rapier]

[some waygug-in]

Dr. Mercola's Comment:


If you have been viewing the media you must have seen the scare the media and the president are seeking to orchestrate on you and the public. According to a draft of the government's plan to fight a potentially cataclysmic pandemic, this new bird super-flu could kill nearly 2 MILLION Americans.

But I nearly fell out of my seat in the airplane as I was flying back from a conference in Ft. Lauderdale when I read that in the BEST-case scenario, only 200,000 people might die.

Then they post the frightening picture from the 1918 flu epidemic to heighten the fear. It just amazes me how they can get away with this type of reporting that is so obviously manipulated by the government and drug companies to scare you into taking the flu vaccine.

The popular media continues to reinforce this unbased fear. In the editorial section of the October 17, 2005 issue of the Wall Street Journal, Dr. Henry Miller, former director of the Office of Biotechnology at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), seeks to frighten the U.S. public by telling us that the bird flu virus can jump from birds to humans and produce, and is a fatal illness in 50 percent of those infected.

Ah, there's the rub.

A 50 percent fatality rate sounds pretty scary to me. What Dr. Miller and the other experts fail to explain is how these numbers were derived. Did they examine everyone who contracted the bird flu and use those numbers, or did they examine the sickest of the sick who had come down with the bird flu and determine the mortality rate from there?

Of course, it was the latter, and from the 60 people who have died from this in THIRD-world countries we are being told that anywhere from 200,000, AT BEST, to 2 million people at worst will die from the bird flu.

This is shoddy science at best and beyond belief that any reputable scientist could get away with such nonsense.

http://www.mercola.com/2005/oct/25/avian_flu_epidemic_is_a_hoax.htm

[rapier]

From this morning's Bangkok Post- useful:

http://www.bangkokpost.com/News/27Feb2006_news09.php

Factory farms behind bird flu spread

Wild birds not really to blame

ACHARA ASHAYAGACHAT
A new report released yesterday blamed the transnational poultry industry, and not small-scale poultry farming and wild birds, as the root cause of the global bird flu crisis.

The spread of industrial poultry production and trade networks has actually created ideal conditions for the emergence and transmission of lethal viruses like the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu, said Devlin Kuyek, of the Montreal-based international non-governmental organisation Grain.

Once inside densely populated factory farms, viruses can rapidly become lethal and amplify, said Mr Kuyek in the report released today.

Air thick with viral load from infected farms was carried for kilometres, while integrated trade networks spread the disease through many carriers: live birds, day-old chicks, meat, feathers, hatching eggs, eggs, chicken manure and animal feed, he added.

"Everyone is focused on migratory birds and backyard chickens as the problem," said the researcher of Grain, which promotes the sustainable management and use of agricultural biodiversity based on people's control over genetic resources and local knowledge.

"But they are not effective vectors of highly pathogenic bird flu. The virus kills them, but is unlikely to be spread by them," he said.

For example, in Malaysia, the mortality rate from H5N1 among village chicken was only 5%, indicating that the virus had a hard time spreading among small-scale chicken flocks.

H5N1 outbreaks in Laos, which was surrounded by infected countries, have only occurred in the nation's few factory farms, which were supplied by Thai hatcheries, the report said.

The only cases of bird flu in backyard poultry, which account for over 90% of Laos' production, occurred next to the factory farms.

"The evidence we see over and over again, from the Netherlands in 2003 to Japan in 2004 to Egypt in 2006, is that lethal bird flu breaks out in large-scale industrial chicken farms and then spreads to other places and regions," Mr Kuyek explained.

The Nigerian outbreak earlier this year began at a single factory farm, owned by a cabinet minister, distant from hotspots for migratory birds but known for importing unregulated hatchable eggs.

In India, local authorities said that H5N1 emerged and spread from a factory farm owned by the country's largest poultry company, Venkateshwara Hatcheries.

Grain asked a burning question why governments and international agencies, like the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, were doing nothing to investigate how the factory farms and their byproducts, such as animal feed and manure, spread the virus.

Instead, they were using the crisis as an opportunity to further industrialise the poultry sector.

Initiatives are multiplying to ban outdoor poultry, squeeze out small producers and restock farms with genetically-modified chickens.

The web of complicity with an industry engaged in a string of denials and cover-ups seems complete, he said.

"Farmers are losing their livelihoods, native chickens are being wiped out and some experts say that we are on the verge of a human pandemic that could kill millions of people," Mr Kuyek concluded.

[mithridates]