Korean Job Discussion Forums

[rapier]

I see bird flu is besieging Northern russia right now. The sh*t is hitting the fan, finally...

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-birdflu2mar02,0,5101851.story?coll=la-home-world

Can't say i'm sorry at the prospect of a widescale desertion of the domestic pultry and cagebird industry- its inhumane, cruel,unhygenic,- and I stopped eating Chicken a long time ago.

[EFLtrainer]

From that article:

[rapier]

[rapier]

It looks like science is finally coming around to my point of view. take a read.

Reality takes wing over bird flu

Leon Bennun, BBC News, 17 February

Vested interests mean wild birds are being blamed for the spread of avian flu, argues Dr Leon Bennun in this week's Green Room, whereas responsibility really lies with modern farming.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4721598.stm

During the second week in February, Western Europe reported its first cases of the highly pathogenic H5N1 strain of avian flu in wild birds.

Across Italy, Greece and Slovenia, more than 25 mute swans died; by Valentine's Day, the virus had also been found in wild swans in Austria and Germany.

Conservationists, poultry keepers and health officials are bracing themselves for more widespread outbreaks.

Fuelled in part by alarmist press reports and by the attempts of government agencies to draw blame away from farming, there are now calls for drastic measures against wild bird populations.

I believe these measures would put some species at risk of extinction, without having any effect on the spread of avian flu.

Catching the culprits

The likelihood is that the swans now dying in Western Europe had recently arrived from the Black Sea, driven south and west by freezing conditions that prevented them feeding.

They may have caught the disease from other wild birds; but this is unlikely given the tens of thousands of waterfowl that have tested negative for H5N1 over the last decade.

Bird flu

Much more likely is that before starting out, they picked up the virus from farms, either from infected poultry or their faeces. Mute swans often graze agricultural fields, and are likely to have come into contact with poultry manure spread as a fertiliser.

If wild birds had been spreading the disease across continents there would have been trails of outbreaks following migration routes; but this hasn't happened.

The "wild bird" theory for the spread of H5N1 also provides no explanation as to why certain countries on flight paths of birds from Asia remain flu-free, whilst their neighbours suffer repeated infections.

What is striking is that countries like Japan and South Korea, which imposed strict controls on the import and movement of domestic poultry after initial outbreaks, have suffered no further infections. Myanmar has never had an outbreak.

In fact, countries which have not yet developed a large-scale intensive poultry industry have also been largely spared. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reports that in Laos, 42 out of 45 outbreaks affected intensive poultry units.

Lethal evolution

*Highly pathogenic avian influenza viruses are very rare in wild birds.
*Intensively-farmed poultry provide ideal conditions for the evolution of highly lethal forms

But in intensively farmed poultry, the high density of birds and constant exposure to faeces, saliva and other secretions provide ideal conditions for the replication, mutation, recombination and selection through which highly lethal forms can evolve.

Add to this repeated misdiagnosis, industry and government cover-ups, and panic selling or processing of potentially infected birds, and we have the explanation for why H5N1 is now endemic in parts of South-East Asia.

Factor in the global nature of the poultry industry, and the international movement of live poultry and poultry products both before and after the Asian outbreaks, and we have the most plausible mechanism for the spread of the virus between places which are not connected by the flyways of migratory birds.

The timing and pattern of outbreaks has been largely inconsistent with wild bird movements; but they have often followed major trade routes.

The view that poultry movements have played a major role in the spread of the disease is supported by an analysis of viral strains recently published in the US journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Some of the agencies attempting to monitor and control avian flu, such as the FAO, seem to have been reluctant to draw attention to the role of intensive agriculture, because of the impact on national economies and on access to cheap sources of protein.

Senseless destruction

For this and other reasons, the role of migratory wild birds in the transmission of the disease has been exaggerated, and further sensationalised in the press.

In some countries there has been a backlash against bird conservation, leading to calls for the culling of whole populations, draining of wetlands and destruction of nesting sites.

In fact, H5N1 outbreaks in wild birds have so far mostly burned themselves out without culls or other human interventions.

Some of the world's most threatened birds may be put at risk. But there is also the near-certainty of damage to ecosystem services on which people and economies depend.

Alarmingly for those who fear a human bird flu epidemic, such a distorted picture also means that the right questions are not being asked, and the most effective protection measures may not be undertaken.

BirdLife is calling for an independent inquiry into the spread of H5N1 which gives due weight to the role of the global poultry industry, and maps both official and unofficial poultry trade routes against the pattern of outbreaks.

It may also be time to take a long, hard look at the way the world feeds itself, and to decide whether the price paid for modern farming in terms of risks to human health and the Earth's biodiversity is too high.

[rapier]

The aves, and ave nots

Feb 23rd 2006, The Economist

Avian influenza is spreading to many new countries. But migrating wild birds may not be the only culprits

http://www.theelectroniceconomist.com/science/displayStory.cfm?story_id=5545392

IN AROUND a month, bird flu has appeared in a seemingly alarming number of new countries. The disease is already endemic in the poultry flocks of much of Asia. In the face of the relentless march of the H5N1 virus around the world, fatalism is not an appropriate response. Better to look at exactly what is going on.

The arrival of bird flu in Europe and its neighbourhood has caused most of the flap, yet the cases in Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Greece, Italy, Slovenia, Iran, Austria, Germany, France, Hungary and Croatia are only in wild birds. In Nigeria, Egypt and India, the virus has been discovered to be widely distributed across poultry flocks.


While the presence of the virus in any form is a concern, Nigeria, Egypt and India face bigger problems coping with dense farmed avian populations, and they are less well equipped to deal with them. More significantly, it is increasingly apparent that the real and most immediate issue is to what extent wild birds, or humans themselves, are responsible for the infection's spread in poultry.

A research paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, published online on February 10th, shows that the H5N1 virus has persisted in its birthplace, southern China, for almost ten years and has been introduced into Vietnam on at least three occasions, and to Indonesia. The authors suggest that such transmissions are perpetuated mainly by the movement of poultry and poultry products, rather than by migrating birds.

This is significant because it strongly supports bird conservationists, who have been arguing that most outbreaks in South-East Asia can be linked to movements of poultry and poultry products, or infected material from poultry farms, such as mud on vehicles or people's shoes. Conservationists also argue that live animal markets have played an important role in the H5N1's spread. Such markets were the source of the first known outbreak in Hong Kong in 1997 when 20% of the chickens in live poultry markets were infected.

BirdLife International, a conservation group, reckons there are three likely transmission routes for H5N1: commercial trade and the movement of poultry; trade in wild birds; and the use of infected poultry manure as agricultural fertiliser. Bird conservationists add that although migratory birds can carry and transmit the virus, it is often not clear whether they picked up the infection from poultry.

In Nigeria, there is the suggestion that it was trade, and not migratory birds, that caused the outbreak. For one thing, the infection was first detected in a commercial farm with 46,000 poultry and not among backyard flocks which represent 60% of the country's poultry production—and which would be expected to have greater contact with wild birds.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) estimates Nigeria imports around 1.2m day-old chicks every year. Further, there are rumours that many of these chicks are still arriving from countries with domestic H5N1 infections, such as China and Turkey. Joseph Domenech, head of the animal health service at the FAO's headquarters in Rome, says the importation of chickens from contaminated countries is forbidden.

The Nigerian government is now taking action to eliminate the virus. Its challenge will be to get the message to ordinary Nigerians about the urgent need to cull birds, prevent poultry movement and disinfect farms. Dick Thompson, of the World Health Organisation, responded to a report that Nigerians had been seen retrieving dead chickens from a pit of culled birds by saying it was a ��really scary activity and something not been seen before��.

Neighbouring countries are also moving into action. This week a meeting was held in Senegal to try to establish a regional strategy for containment. Money should be available. Last month $1.9 billion was pledged by countries and international groups for the fight against avian flu—half a billion more than expected, which underscores the extent to which the disease is seen as a global threat. Infection across Africa would increase the likelihood that the virus will mutate to become transmissible between humans. But there is another vital dimension: the loss of farm income and of a vital source of protein could also be devastating for Africa. That ought to be food for thought for Europeans worried about a few dead swans.

[rapier]

I see no replies to my links/ articles...Is this victory? Certainly there is a wave of scientific consensus now that points to poultry practises rather than wild birds as the causes.
Then let me finish it with one last one:
(This article is probably the best, most informative and exhaustive yet,-I've only quoted about 10% of it- check out the rest).


Fowl play: The poultry industry's central role in the bird flu crisis
Grain, Feb 2006
The deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu is essentially a problem of industrial poultry practices.

"Backyard or free-range poultry are not fuelling the current wave of bird flu outbreaks stalking large parts of the world. The deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu is essentially a problem of industrial poultry practices. Its epicentre is the factory farms of China and Southeast Asia and -- while wild birds can carry the disease, at least for short distances -- its main vector is the highly self-regulated transnational poultry industry, which sends the products and waste of its farms around the world through a multitude of channels. Yet small poultry farmers and the poultry biodiversity and local food security that they sustain are suffering badly from the fall-out. To make matters worse, governments and international agencies, following mistaken assumptions about how the disease spreads and amplifies, are pursuing measures to force poultry indoors and further industrialise the poultry sector. In practice, this means the end of the small-scale poultry farming that provides food and livelihoods to hundreds of millions of families across the world. This paper presents a fresh perspective on the bird flu story that challenges current assumptions and puts the focus back where it should be: on the transnational poultry industry.



Men in white rubber suits and gas masks chasing down chickens in rural villages... Chickens sold and slaughtered in live markets... Wild birds flying across the sky... These are the typical images broadcast by the media in its coverage of the bird flu epidemic. Rare are photos of the booming transnational poultry industry. There are no shots of its factory farms hit by the virus, and no images of its overcrowded trucks transporting live chickens or its feed mills converting "poultry byproducts" into chicken feed.

The selection of images sends a clear message: bird flu is a problem of wild birds and backwards poultry practices, not modern industry. In this way, the most fundamental piece of information needed to understand the recent avian influenza outbreaks gets left out of the picture.

Bird flu is really nothing new. It has co-existed rather peacefully with wild birds, small-scale poultry farming and live markets for centuries. But the wave of highly-pathogenic strains of bird flu that have decimated poultry and killed people across the planet over the past ten years is unprecedented -- as is today's transnational poultry industry.



Chicken concentrate

The transformation of poultry production in Asia in recent decades is staggering. In the Southeast Asian countries where most of the bird flu outbreaks are concentrated -- Thailand, Indonesia, and Viet Nam -- production jumped eightfold in just 30 years, from around 300,000 metric tonnes (mt) of chicken meat in 1971 to 2,440,000 mt in 2001. China's production of chicken tripled during the 1990s to over 9 million mt per year. Practically all of this new poultry production has happened on factory farms concentrated outside of major cities and integrated into transnational production systems.[1] This is the ideal breeding ground for highly-pathogenic bird flu -- like the H5N1 strain threatening to explode into a human flu pandemic.[2]

Nevertheless, the many papers, statements and strategy documents coming out of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), World Health Organisation (WHO) and relevant government agencies contain barely a whisper about the implications of industrial poultry in the bird flu crisis. Instead, fingers are pointed at backyard farms, with calls for tighter controls on their operations and greater "restructuring" of the poultry sector. The big poultry corporations are even trying to use the bird flu outbreaks as an "opportunity" to do away with what is left of small-scale poultry production.[3] "We cannot control migratory birds but we can surely work hard to close down as many backyard farms as possible," said Margaret Say, Southeast Asian director for the USA Poultry and Egg Export Council.

The reactions from some scientists are no less outrageous. Researchers in the UK are pursuing transgenic bird flu-resistant chickens. "Once we have regulatory approval, we believe it will only take between four and five years to breed enough chickens to replace the entire world population," said Laurence Tiley, Professor of Molecular Virology at Cambridge University.[4]

Backyard farming is not an idle pastime for landowners. It is the crux of food security and farming income for hundreds of millions of rural poor in Asia and elsewhere, providing a third of the protein intake for the average rural household.[5] Nearly all rural households in Asia keep at least a few chickens for meat, eggs and even fertilizer and they are often the only livestock that poor farmers can afford. The birds are thus critical to their diversified farming methods, just as the genetic diversity of poultry on small farms is critical to the long-term survival of poultry farming in general.

The FAO knows this. Before the Asian bid flu crisis, it vaunted the benefits of backyard poultry for the rural poor and biodiversity and ran programmes encouraging it.[6] But today, with the H5N1 strain at the gates of Western Europe, it is more common to hear the FAO speak of the risks of backyard farming. This is a reckless mistake. When it comes to bird flu, diverse small-scale poultry farming is the solution, not the problem.



Backyard poultry is a solution, not the problem

The backyard chicken is the big problem and the fight against bird flu must be waged in the backyard of the world's poor.

Louise Fresco, Assistant Director-General of FAO[7]

The argument used against backyard farming generally goes like this: in backyard farms, poultry wander around in the open, coming into frequent contact with wild birds carrying the bird flu virus and humans vulnerable to transmission. These farms are thus said to act like a mixing bowl for the constant circulation of the disease. Backyard farms are also frustrating for authorities because their very nature -- small-scale, free-range, scattered and informal -- makes it difficult for them to implement their two major control measures: culling and vaccination.

The argument is widely accepted by governments around the world, and today most farm level laws and policies for the control of bird flu seek to keep poultry separated from wild birds, as seen in Table 1.

Table 1: Measures to control bird flu targeting backyard poultry in a selection of countries

Country
Measure

Austria
Ban on outdoor poultry from October to December. Ordinance extended indefinitely around area where H5N1-infected swans were found.

Canada
Ban on outdoor poultry in the Province of Quebec

China
Anhui provincial government decrees all backyard poultry must be kept in cages. Complete ban on backyard birds in Hong Kong

Croatia
Ban on outdoor poultry during migration season

France
Ban on outdoor poultry, with exceptions

Germany
Ban on outdoor poultry.

Italy
Free range birds (15-20% of poultry sector) have to be under wire-screens

Netherlands
Ban on outdoor poultry, with exceptions

Nigeria
Backyard poultry and birds banned within the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja

Norway
Ban on outdoor poultry in eight southern counties

Slovenia
Ban on outdoor poultry

Sweden
Ban on outdoor poultry

Switzerland
Poultry must be kept within roofed enclosures

Thailand
Restrictions on free-ranging ducks. Ban on live poultry markets in Bangkok and slaughterhouses moved to outskirts. Forced collectivisation of small poultry flocks in central provinces.

Ukraine
Sale of live poultry and poultry products produced by private village households is prohibited in the Autonomous Region of Crimea. Ban does not apply to factory produced poultry.

Viet Nam
Ban on poultry farming in towns and cities




By and large, these laws and policies are totally impractical for small farmers. In Southeast Asia, governments, with the support of the FAO, are encouraging farmers to set up mesh screens or bamboo enclosures for their poultry. But the costs, estimated at US$50-70, are out of reach for Asia's small-holders, who typically make less than US$1 a day, and, in places like Thailand, where such measures have been enacted, it has immediately forced small farmers to abandon poultry.[8] Even organic farmers in Switzerland are giving up their flocks because they cannot afford the added costs of bringing their birds indoors.[9] Furthermore, organic farmers who do not allow their livestock free access to the outdoors, as organic standards around the world require, are at risk of losing their organic certification. The impacts of these measures are already real for farmers even if bird flu is not present in their areas -- and even if there is no evidence that keeping birds indoors does anything to stop the virus.[10]



Wild birds and poultry should not mix?

The movement of migratory birds has caused outbreaks to emerge in several countries and regions simultaneously.

FAO, November 2005[11]

Despite such statements from the FAO or the WHO, there is still little evidence of migratory birds carrying and transmitting highly pathogenic H5N1. After testing hundreds of thousands of wild birds for the disease, scientists have only rarely identified live birds carrying bird flu in a highly pathogenic form.[12] As the FAO has stated as recently as November 2005, "To date, extensive testing of clinically normal migratory birds in the infected countries has not produced any positive results for H5N1 so far."[13] Nearly all wild birds that have tested positive for the disease were dead and, in most cases, found near to outbreaks in domestic poultry. Even with the current cases of H5N1 in wild birds in Europe, experts agree that these birds probably contracted the virus in the Black Sea region, where H5N1 is well-established in poultry, and died while heading westward to escape the unusually cold conditions in the area.

One popular incident cited in the case against wild birds was a mass outbreak of H5N1 among geese in Qinghai Lake, Northern China. A theory was quickly constructed of how the virus was then carried westwards by migratory birds to Kazakhstan, Russia and even Turkey. But bird conservationists, and notably the organisation BirdLife International, pointed out that Qinghai Lake has many surrounding poultry operations. They also noted that there is a fish farm in the area that the FAO helped construct, and that chicken faeces are commonly used as food and fertiliser in integrated fish farms in China.[14] Furthermore, many trains and roads connect the Qinghai Lake area to areas of bird flu outbreaks, like Lanzhou, the source of infected poultry that caused an earlier outbreak of H5N1 in Tibet, 1,500 miles away.[15] However, none of these alternative scenarios drew much attention from the FAO or other major international authorities.

The main weakness in the migratory bird theory is that the geographical spread of the disease does not match with migratory routes and seasons. "No species migrates from Qinghai, China, west to Eastern Europe," says BirdLife's Dr Richard Thomas. "When plotted, the pattern of outbreaks follows major road and rail routes, not flyways. And the absence of outbreaks in Africa, South and Southeast Asia and Australasia this autumn is hard to explain, if wild birds are the primary carriers."[16] If migratory birds are transmitting the disease, why has bird flu not hit the Philippines or Burma, and why has it been confined to a few commercial operations in Laos, when all three countries are surrounded by bird flu-infected countries? Even if it is possible for migratory birds to transport the disease, as recent cases in Europe suggest, there are much more significant vectors of transmission that should be the focus of attention. There is simply no good reason to batten down the hatches and force poultry indoors.

http://www.grain.org/briefings/?id=194

[Manner of Speaking]

Am I the only one here who understands the difference between a "discussion" and a "contest"?

[rapier]