We'll all be vegans someday

The animal industry is going to kill us eventually. Now the "bird flu" is being found in Pigs. What'll you have this morning, bacon and eggs with a respiratory failure? Would you prefer SARS or H5N1 with that, sir?

 The cost-saving measures that drive people to keep large numbers of commercially raised animals in close quarters with unhealthy conditions are starting to result in real threats to people on a massive scale. Someday we'll look back on this time and say "Oh my god, why didn't we see all the red flags".

For those of us that do buy animal products, please if you can possibly afford it buy only ethically and environmentally sensitive products, preferably raised locally, on small farms, by real people. this is the fastest way to put factory farms out of business.

AVIAN INFLUENZA - EASTERN ASIA (48): INDONESIA, PIGS
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[1]
Date: Thu, 14 Apr 2005
From: Debora MacKenzie <[e-mail]>
Source: NewScientist.com news service, 14 Apr 2005 [edited]

Bird flu identified in Indonesian pigs
---------------------------------------
Indonesian scientists have found the H5N1 bird flu virus in a pig.
The strain has infected poultry across east Asia, and killed at least
51 people so far.

Scientists fear pigs could act as a "mixing vessel" in which a human
pandemic strain could evolve, because the animals can harbour both
human and avian flu viruses.

But while suspected, such hybridisation has never been proven.
Furthermore, New Scientist has learned of preliminary results from
scientists in the US that suggest pigs might not be able to transmit
H5N1 flu to one another.

Java was the worst-affected part of Indonesia during 2004's H5N1 bird
flu outbreak. But by slaughtering and vaccinating poultry, Indonesia
stopped the outbreak in October -- with no reported human cases. But
in April 2005, bird flu struck poultry throughout Java once again,
mainly in village-based "backyard" flocks.

Indonesia offers free vaccination for such flocks. But vaccinated
birds can still harbour and spread the virus unless they are strictly
monitored for infection. Amin Soebandrio, a microbiologist and
Indonesia's assistant deputy minister for health sciences, told New
Scientist that while larger farms do such monitoring, smallholders
cannot.

Now C A Nidom, of Airlangga University in Surabaya, in east Java, has
found the H5N1 virus in throat swabs and blood samples from a pig in
Surabaya. It is the same "highly pathogenic" variant that causes
severe disease in chickens. And, says Soebandrio, the isolated
virus's gene for a crucial surface protein, haemagglutinin, was more
than 98 percent identical to samples taken from infected Indonesian
chickens and quail.

Traces of H5N1 infection had been reported in 1 pig in Vietnam and 2
in China. But this is the 1st time that a virus isolated from a
natural infection in pigs has been genetically sequenced.

Pigs are of concern because they can be infected by both bird flu
viruses and flu viruses from mammals. A hybrid bird-human virus could
have a haemagglutinin from birds that human immune systems will not
recognise, and genes from human-adapted flu that will make the hybrid
highly contagious in people.

"It is almost certainly true that viruses of different species can
mix in pigs -- pigs have numerous 'hybrid' viruses," says Richard
Webby of St Jude's Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, US. "But
the pig as a mixing vessel for human flu pandemics is just a
hypothesis."

The pandemics of 1957 and 1968, which killed millions, did seem to
result from the mixing of bird flu strains with mammalian flu,
although where this occurred is not known. However, the even greater
1918 pandemic did not.

Robert Webster of St. Jude's told a meeting on biosecurity in Lyon,
France in March 2005 that his lab has found that H5N1 grows well in
pigs, making hybridisation theoretically possible. But it might not
get far -- infected pigs, Webster told New Scientist, do not pass
H5N1 to each other. This means relatively few pigs will catch it.
[see
<http://www.upmc-biosecurity.org/pages/events/biosafety/speakers/webster/webster.html>]

Poultry may be more important for the virus's evolution. And this
week Vietnam announced [see 20050413.1063] that it had found H5N1
infection in 71 percent of farmed ducks in the crowded Mekong Delta,
where there have been many cases of human infection.

Ducks seem able to harbour the virus without showing symptoms, and in
Vietnam many live in the open where they can spread the virus. So far
Vietnam has not vaccinated poultry, but the Vietnamese agriculture
ministry announced in March 2005 that it would start vaccinating
ducks in the Mekong delta for H5N1 flu in April.

--
Debora MacKenzie
Brussels correspondent
New Scientist
<[e-mail]>

**
[2]
Date: Thu, 14 Apr 2005
From: Irene Lai <<mailto:[e-mail]>[e-mail]>

RE: Avian influenza - Eastern Asia (46): Indonesia, pigs, RFI
-------------------------------------------------------------
This is from one of my colleagues (a doctor) who is working in
Indonesia. He visited a pig and chicken farm in Bali.

"There were 1000 chickens living over 20 pig pens with just slats
between them.  It is a farming system called tampung sari. This way
the chickens' faeces falls directly to the pigs and they eat it.
Apparently pigs can get up to 40 percent of the RDA [nutritional
recommended daily allowance ] from chicken faeces, and it is common
practice to feed chicken faeces to pigs.

To my knowledge culled chickens are not used to feed pigs (at least
in tampung sari), but it is possible. It is well known that chicken
faeces [i.e., feces from infected chickens] contain H5N1, so the
exposure from chicken faeces is enough to explain the finding.

Likewise, in China, ducks and pigs live closely together so that it
is easy to explain the finding of H5N1 in pigs in China in 2004."

--
Dr Irene Lai
International SOS
<[e-mail]>

[Integrated farming systems are meant to utilize the products of one
sub-system by another sub-system, generating useful materials like
protein biomass in the process. Various combinations are known. In
Southeast Asia, integrated systems combining chickens/ducks, pigs and
fish are widely applied. - Mod.AS]

[see also:
Avian influenza - Eastern Asia (44): Indonesia, pigs, RFI  
20050412.1058
Avian influenza - Eastern Asia (46): Indonesia, pigs, RFI  
20050413.1072
Avian influenza - Eastern Asia (45): Viet Nam, ducks     20050413.1063]
.....................arn/pg/lm

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