bird flu???

[Guest guest]

The Pharmaceutical industry has brainwashed the

orthodox medical profession into " curing " so many

" symptoms " that this long term process has debased the

immune system of a large part of the human race.

 

The poorer remains of the race are so malnourished and

weakened that their immune systems are debased anyway.

 

The result of this process is the fact that many

infections, such as avian flu, -- which would be

thrown off by a normal strong immune system --- now

cause pandemics.

 

BUT WE DID THIS TO OURSELVES!!.

 

The absurd fact in all of this is that many Drs now

suggest that young children are allowed to mess about

in the dirt and muck , in order to STRENGTHEN their

immune systems!!.

 

So we do know the right thing to do. ELIMINATE

PHARMECEUTICALS and STOP MESSING ABOUT WITH NATURE!.

 

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.