Cross-posted at The Next Hurrah
North Korea, the country that can't feed its people may lose all its poultry. It isn't just Effect Measure, the public health blog, that's following this. Now it's the UN. Via Reuters:
A top United Nations bird flu expert has flown to North Korea to help assess and contain outbreaks of the disease among poultry in the secretive state, the Food and Agriculture Organization said on Wednesday. Hans Wagner, a senior FAO official based in Bangkok who has played a prominent role in Asia's battle against the deadly H5N1 virus, flew to Pyongyang on Tuesday, a day after North Korea told the agency of outbreaks without saying which strain caused them.
As Effect Measure reports:
The context is grim. A great deal of money, effort and hope was invested in poultry production by the North Korean government. Struggling to feed its undernourished population of 23 million, a special state agency was established for breeding chickens and ducks in December of 2001 (UPI via World Peace Herald).
While poultry was one of the few growing sectors of the economy, the country produced only about 25 million birds in 2004, just over one per person/year, far short of Kim Jong Il's promised one kilogram of chicken meat and 60 eggs a month for every household in Pyongyang. The number of chickens estimated in North Korea is about 19 million. Now mass culling is reducing this already inadequate source of protein.
Pyongyang's public admission of the previously denied bird flu outbreak is seen by many as a sure sign the problem has spiraled out of control and foreign help is needed. The epidemic has probably already hit the poor rural area and is spreading. North Korea has mobilized its military to cull and disinfect poultry farms around Pyongyang, according to the South Korean Unification Ministry:
Thousands of soldiers from the Pyongyang Defense Command and 3d Army Corps are involved in the slaughter and burial of diseased fowl," a Unification Ministry official told the
Joong Ang Ilbo.
[ . . . ]
According to the Unification Ministry, the North's mobilization of the military is evidence of the seriousness of the situation. North Korean troops, after finishing winter drills this month, were scheduled to assist farmers during spring planting, the ministry said. The North shifted the assignment of the soldiers to cope with the spread of bird flu, officials said.
So while the Bush Administration and our European allies were dithering over North Korea's nuclear
shenanigans, another kind of bomb was ticking in the Korean peninsula, where the current Asian bird flu outbreak began in 2003 in the South and spread to Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam, China and Indonesia.
But the main conclusion is worth repeating:
It is time to stop talking this way and plan seriously for a pandemic in the near future. With good luck it won't happen, although no one at the moment can give a convincing argument why it shouldn't and there are plenty of plausible arguments why it should. If I were a betting person, I wouldn't bet my money against a pandemic. Why should I bet my life on it?
Whether it's the loss of food stuffs in an area of the world that can ill afford the economic and humanitarian consequences, or the dreaded pandemic that health experts fear, we have a problem. It doesn't mean panicking in your living room, but it does mean supporting your politicians who want to make this an issue. It means that this is a true 'developing' story. It means paying attention to the Cassandras, who might just be on to something here. Egad.
More in the series here. See also diaries by Carnacki and SusanHu, who first wrote about N Korea.