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Bird flu: Diminishing the
risk
By Richard S Ehrlich
BANGKOK - Humans are faced with an "extremely
high" risk of additional deaths by bird flu in Thailand
and elsewhere in Asia, because many do not wear
protective clothing while collecting and burying
millions of diseased chickens, according to the United
Nations' Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO). This
warning is one of many being cited by experts,
frantically working to find a global strategy to tackle
the bird flu crisis.
At least eight people have
already died from bird flu in Vietnam and Thailand -
after officials failed to protect their citizens while
haughtily assuring them the virus was not present. Ten
countries have reluctantly reported bird-flu strains:
Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Japan, Laos, Pakistan, South
Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam.
"If you saw
the films on CNN and BBC, you saw that the people were
handling these [chickens] and disposing of these
chickens without any protective clothing, wearing no
mask, wearing no goggles," said Hans Wagner, FAO's
Bangkok-based senior regional animal production and
health officer, in a recorded interview.
"If
these are infected chickens, then the risk that they
[chicken farmers] contract the disease through droplet
infection is extremely high," Wagner said. "So our
strong recommendation is that everyone who works on
disposing of these chickens, wear appropriate protective
gear. That gear is in the [UN] guidelines and is:
wearing goggles, wearing mask, wearing gowns, wearing
rubber boots and after every day to dispose of all of
this gear and put on new ones."
In Thailand,
some soldiers, culling teams and prisoners who are
slaughtering chickens received some protective gear -
including plastic shower caps - but many rural people
cannot afford such protection, especially if it is
expected to be thrown away each day and replaced. More
than 20 million chickens have been slaughtered in
Thailand alone.
Traditional baskets, used for
moving animals to and from markets throughout Asia, also
increase the risk of more chickens and people dying from
bird flu.
"If you go here to the live poultry
market, you see that one way of transporting the poultry
is in wicker baskets. Now these wicker baskets, they get
contaminated with feces. They get contaminated, or they
get in contact, with maybe-infected chickens in the
market.
"These wicker baskets then go back to
the farms without being de-infected, without being
burned, so they are at risk of bringing diseases back
into the farm," the UN official said.
Infected
migratory birds flying south for the winter from
freezing, northern countries might also be spreading the
disease to chickens in tropical Southeast Asia, Pakistan
and elsewhere when the virus is dropped from the sky via
excrement or deposited after foreign birds touch down
and forage for food near chicken farms. An editorial
cartoon in Tuesday's Bangkok Post portrayed flying birds
dropping bombs labeled "H5N1" - a strain of bird flu
also fatal to humans - on a hapless planet Earth.
"You have to avoid the contact of wild birds,
migratory birds, with your domestic birds," Wagner said.
"Chicken farms must always be shut off from the outside
world, and nets and fences must block all areas where
foreign birds can land or swim to reach chickens."
Thailand and other Asian countries failed to protect
most of their chickens in such a way because such
defenses were too expensive for family-run chicken
farms, traditionally kept open, added
Wagner.
Meanwhile, the corporate-run chicken
industry has special zones and sealed facilities for its
chickens and can still make a profit, because they
operate on a huge scale. In Thailand, only 1 percent of
chicken farms have more than 1,000 chickens, which means
99 percent are small-scale farms which cannot afford
sophisticated "bio-secure" infrastructure, Wagner said.
Eggs are also dangerous because their shells
often carry splattered feces that could be infected.
"The major risk comes definitely from the feces and from
the possibility that the eggshells are contaminated with
feces," Wagner earlier told reporters. "It is calculated
that one gram of chicken feces can infect 1 million
birds."
Bird flu appears to be spreading in Asia
and it is impossible to predict when the virus can be
brought under control, the UN official said.
(Copyright 2004 Richard S Ehrlich.)
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