Bird Flu - Guardian Report

Pat's Note: My heart soars. Eventually someone is going to apply some of
this logic to pigs...and the PMWS, CSF and FMD outbreaks

http://society.guardian.co.uk/health/story/0,,1792075,00.html

So who's really to blame for bird flu?

According to experts, wild birds are spreading the deadly H5N1 virus that's
wiping out poultry worldwide. But are they really to blame? Or is the
disease not only a direct result of intensive farming - but actually being
spread by the industry? Joanna Blythman reports

Wednesday June 7, 2006

The Guardian

If you normally make a point of buying free-range poultry and eggs, then you
may be wondering if this is any longer a wise decision. The television
reportage of bird flu, with its shots of men wearing white suits and masks
chasing chickens in poor, rural Asian or African villages, or footage of
chickens being slaughtered in third world markets while sinister-looking,
positively Hitchcockian wild birds circle overhead, has helped build the
perception that H5N1 is a disease of wild birds and domesticated poultry
kept outdoors in primitive - and, by implication, dodgy - circumstances. On
the home front, the nation is on amber alert. All the major summer
agricultural shows have decided to abandon their customary displays of live
poultry. The fear is that H5N1 is winging its way to Britain, and that if we
don't get every last chicken, hen and budgie indoors, then it could mutate
into a human flu pandemic and any minute we'll be dead.

A stream of statements and strategy documents from august bodies such as the
World Health Organisation reinforce the "wild birds and backyard poultry are
the problem" plot-line. This must come as music to the ears of the intensive
poultry producers, who heartily resent the good press that organic and
free-range poultry generally receive. For once it is free-range birds that
everyone is worried about, not the caged laying hens and tightly packed
broiler birds that generally feature in food exposes.

But what if those august bodies have got it wrong? Multiple cracks are
beginning to show in the supposed scientific consensus on the origins of
avian flu. A growing number of non-governmental organisations, bird experts
and independent vets are pointing the finger at the global intensive poultry
industry. A new report from Grain, an international environmental
organisation, challenges the official line. "H5N1 is essentially a problem
of industrial poultry practices," it says. "Its epicentre is the factory
farms of China and south-east Asia. Although wild birds can carry the
disease, at least for short distances, [the main infection] route is the
highly self-regulated transnational poultry industry, which sends its
products and wastes around the world through a multitude of channels."

Grain's alternative theory for the emergence of H5N1 - which got backing in
an editorial in the Lancet medical journal last month - starts with the
observation that bird flu has coexisted pretty peacefully with wild birds,
small-scale poultry farming and live markets for centuries without evolving
into a more dangerous form of the disease. An explanation for this is that
outdoor poultry flocks tend to be low-density, localised, and offer plenty
of genetic diversity in breeding stock. By contrast, the hi-tech, intensive
poultry farm, where as many as 40,000 birds can be kept in one shed and
reared entirely indoors without ever seeing the light of day, is just like
an overcrowded nursery of wheezy toddlers when the latest winter bug comes
knocking - an ideal environment for spreading the disease and for
encouraging the rapid mutation of a mild virus into a more pathogenic and
highly transmissible strain, such as H5N1. "What we are saying is that H5N1
is a poultry virus killing wild birds, not the other way around," says
Devlin Kuyek, from Grain.

The organisation's view is supported by the charity BirdLife International,
which plots the migratory routes of wild birds. "With few exceptions, there
is a limited correlation between the pattern and timing of spread among
domestic birds and wild bird migrations," it says. It points out that most
of the bird flu outbreaks in south-east Asian countries can be linked to the
movements of poultry and poultry products. Looking at the outbreaks in
Nigeria and Egypt, which occurred almost simultaneously in multiple
large-scale poultry operations, it says that there is "strong circumstantial
evidence" that it was the transfer of infected material - straw, soil on
vehicles, clothes or shoes - from one factory unit to another that spread
H5N1 there, not wild birds.

To British animal welfare experts, this alternative theory makes a lot of
sense. Intensive poultry farms, particularly those producing chicken meat or
"broilers", are notorious for rapidly spreading and amplifying diseases.
Pathogenic bugs such as salmonella, campylobacter and Newcastle disease are
already endemic among factory-farmed poultry. Half the British chickens on
supermarket shelves tested by the Health Protection Agency in 2005 were
contaminated with multi drug-resistant strains of the potentially deadly E
coli bug. "Broilers are particularly vulnerable to disease for many
reasons," says Dr Lesley Lambert, of Compassion in World Farming. "The birds
are genetically very similar because they have been bred to put on rapid
muscle growth, however this compromises their immune, skeletal and
respiratory systems. They stand on a thick cake of impacted litter and
droppings, in close proximity to one another, and share the same warm air
space. It's the perfect circumstances for disease to sweep through."

But where, exactly, might H5N1 have originated? There is some speculation
that the initial source was in China. The Washington Post has reported that
as recently as the late 90s, in an unsuccessful attempt to keep the lid on
less virulent strains of bird flu, intensive poultry farms in China were
using, with the full approval of their government, an anti-viral drug called
Amantadine. This drug is intended for humans and its use to treat birds
would be a violation of international poultry regulations. Such misuse could
have caused the avian flu virus to evolve into the drug-resistant H5N1
strain. In any event, medics and pharmaceutical experts now agree that
Amantadine has become useless in protecting people in case of a worldwide
bird flu epidemic.

But whatever the initial trigger was that caused bird blu to mutate into
deadly H5N1, having once got a grip in an intensive poultry unit, how then
might it have been spread outwards ?

Intense debate has built up over one particular mass outbreak last year
among geese at Qinghai lake in northern China. The widely accepted official
explanation is that migratory birds carried the virus westwards from there
to Russia and Turkey. But according to BirdLife International's Dr Richard
Thomas, no species migrates from Qinghai west to eastern Europe. "The
pattern of outbreaks follows major road and rail routes, not flyways," he
says. What Qinghai lake does have, however, is many surrounding intensive
poultry farms whose "poultry manure", a euphemism for what is scraped off
the floor of factory farms - bird faeces, feathers and soiled litter - is
used as feed and fertiliser in fish farms and fields around Qinghai.
According to WHO, bird flu can survive in bird faeces for up to 35 days.
Might it be that at Qinghai, H5N1 was passed from intensively reared birds
to wild ones via chicken faeces, and not the other way around?

If so, then this is extremely worrying. In Britain, this February, the day
after the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra)
minister Ben Bradshaw assured the public that the British poultry industry
was "very well prepared" for avian flu and had "extremely high levels of
biosecurity", the animal welfare organisation Animal Aid photographed tonnes
of poultry-shed waste containing body parts and feathers that had been
dumped on farm land in West Yorkshire.

When H5N1 turned up in a remote village in eastern Turkey in January, this
was initially blamed on migratory birds. Then when villagers gave their side
of the story, it emerged that their diseased birds were intimately connected
with a large factory farm nearby. The UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation
(FAO) has now acknowledged that the poultry trade spread H5N1 in Turkey,
singling out the common practice of intensive poultry farms sending out huge
truckloads of low-value (possibly ailing) birds to poor farmers. Yet when
bird flu hit a factory farm in Nigeria in February, the FAO spokesman still
insisted: "If it's not wild birds [that are the cause], it will be difficult
to understand." The Nigerian authorities, on the other hand, blamed the
poultry industry. It subsequently emerged that the hatching eggs used by the
farm in question were not from registered hatcheries, and may have come from
a bird flu-infected country, such as Turkey.

Worldwide, intensive poultry production has exploded and this growth seems
to be mirrored by an increase in avian flu. In the south-east Asian
countries where most of the H5N1 outbreaks are concentrated - Thailand,
Indonesia and Vietnam - production has jumped eightfold in just three
decades as cheap chicken meat has become an international commodity.
Conversely, certain other countries in Asia, such as Laos, have experienced
relatively few bird flu outbreaks. In Laos, H5N1 has been restricted mainly
to the country's few factory farms. Laos effectively stamped out bird flu by
closing the border to poultry from Thailand and culling chickens in
commercial operations. "Laos is rife with free-ranging chickens mixing with
ducks, quail, turkeys and wild birds. The principal reason why it has not
suffered widespread bird flu outbreaks is that there is ¬almost no contact
between its small-scale poultry farms which produce nearly all of its
¬domestic supply, and its commercial factory farms, which are integrated
with foreign poultry companies," says Kuyek.

Despite all the evidence now emerging that wild birds may not be the prime
carrier of H5N1, governments are panicking. In Europe alone, Austria,
France, Germany, Sweden, Slovenia, Croatia, Norway and the Netherlands have
all issued bans or restrictions on the keeping of outdoor poultry. So far in
Britain the government has not joined this stampede, probably because
British consumers are particularly keen on free-range poultry products. When
it comes to eggs, for example, we now consume more that come from free-range
systems than from cages.

Farmers who cater for the nation's growing appetite for high-welfare poultry
and eggs are worried, however. Some free-range and organic producers hope
they might be able to bring birds indoor yet benefit from a European Union
rule that would allow them still to sell their produce as free-range or
organic, for a period of up to 12 weeks. Others are against taking advantage
of this. "If you keep birds entirely indoors, they simply stop being
free-range or organic," says Lawrence Woodward, director of Elm Farm
Research Centre. Certainly, it is clear that temporary housing of free-range
or organic birds can never be anything other than a stop-gap measure,
because if H5N1 hits Britain, scientists think it will be endemic for at
least five years.

Once N5N1 is identified in the UK, the solution preferred by the
government's chief scientist, Professor David King, is to ban outdoor
production. But environmental organisations insist that this would be an
enormous mistake. "Bringing birds indoors fails to address the root cause of
disease. The government should support farming that encourages animal
health, so that livestock have naturally robust immune systems developed by
contact with, rather than exclusion from, all disease challenge. Organic and
free-range systems are the foundation stones for such a positive strategy,
not, as some in the intensive industry seek to misrepresent them, as
reservoirs of disease," says Soil Association spokesman Robin Maynard.

Professor King has made it abundantly clear, however, that in his view, the
arrival of this virus would mean that "organic farming and free-range
farming would come to an end". From an administrative point of view, keeping
the nation's birds under lock and key makes any potential cull easy - no
running around farmyards needed. Chillingly, Defra has stated that in the
event of an H5N1 outbreak among indoor flocks, producers will be allowed
simply to shut down the ventilation systems to sheds so that the birds
slowly suffocate to death.
An alternative strategy, advocated by animal welfare groups, is vaccination.
But such measures make less sense to cost-conscious intensive poultry
producers. Broiler (chicken meat) producers in particular are under constant
pressure to minimise costs in order to stay profitable because retailers
demand cheap meat. Vaccination adds to production costs and means more work.
And while it is relatively easy for organic or free-range producers to
vaccinate their birds because their flocks are smaller, it is a daunting
undertaking for intensive producers with flocks of thousands. Moreover, the
vaccine takes two weeks to take effect and the typical broiler lives for
only five weeks anyway, so they do not see the point.

Unless the vaccination lobby prevails - and going on Britain's track record
with foot and mouth disease, the odds are not promising - then consumers may
lose the option of choosing more ethical and humane outdoor-reared poultry
products. So if you are are partial to a crisply roasted free-range chicken,
or a nice organic egg, make a point of savouring them now while you can.
They may not be around for much longer.

· Joanna Blythman's new book, Bad Food Britain - How A Nation Ruined Its
Appetite, is published by Fourth Estate, price £7.99.


--
Regards
Pat Gardiner
www.go-self-sufficient.com


.