Kentucky Fried Flu

It's not just mother Nature against us. It's not only that we have probably, in our stubbornness and ignorance, heated up the planet by cutting down the trees and burning up the carbon, and thus trashed our own life support system. It's not enough that we have allowed the free market to rule for so long that institutionalized poverty covers most of the globe, and disease, hunger, thirst, and violence are now profit centers. Now, in a stupendous act of idiocy, we are smuggling factory farmed disease straight into the heart of Africa, the very place where poverty and currupt government makes it damned near impossible to stop epidemics from growing. Like here times a million. If, and this is a very very big if, as a species we survive our own self-destruction, we will look back on factory farming as among the dumber of the many dumb things that lead us to our own demise.

The Airport in Lagos (LOS) Nigeria: 1 987 360 passengers in 1998.Hot wings anyone? Is that a cough I hear? Read on...

AVIAN INFLUENZA, POULTRY VS MIGRATORY BIRDS (06)
************************************************
A ProMED-mail post
<http://www.promedmail.org>
ProMED-mail is a program of the
International Society for Infectious Diseases
<http://www.isid.org>

Date: 2 Mar 2006
From: Mary Marshall <[e-mail]>
Source: Reuters [edited]
<http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L02497813.htm>

Nigeria suspects that illegal poultry imports were to blame for
introducing
deadly bird flu to Africa's most populous country, the information
minister
said on Thursday. The virus known as H5N1 has spread to 7 of the
country's
36 states and the capital city since it was first detected in northern
Nigeria on 8 Feb, but 90 per cent of infected farms bought day-old
chicks
from one farm in Kano state, minister Frank Nweke said.

"There is a very strong basis to believe that avian flu may have been
introduced into Nigeria through illegally imported day-old chicks," he
said. "Further investigations into the activities of farms where birds
have
tested positive to the highly pathogenic avian flu revealed that 90 per
cent of them patronised the Sovet Farms Ltd in Kano."

Customs agents impounded almost 200 smuggled cartons of hatching eggs
at
the country's main international airport in Lagos in January 2006, he
added.

Agriculture Minister Adamu Bello had originally blamed illegal imports
for
the bird flu outbreak, which has led to the destruction of 450 000
birds
and deaths of thousands more, but he later pointed to migrating wild
birds
as the source.

Niger, an impoverished, landlocked country which borders Nigeria to the
north, has also found the deadly bird flu in poultry, and Nweke said
Nigeria would send experts next week to help deal with the outbreak
there.

Experts want to determine how the virus entered Nigeria, the first
infection in the world's poorest continent, to better stop it spreading
further. Many African countries have already slapped import bans on
Nigerian poultry.

Nigerian authorities have imposed quarantines on infected farms and
ordered
culling, but the measures have been only partially observed on the
ground.
Nweke said the government would begin paying compensation to farmers
affected by culling on Monday.

The government knows of no humans in Nigeria infected with the virus,
which
has been spreading west from Asia for 3 years and has killed 94 people
in 7
countries.

UN Food and Agriculture Organisation experts have said that, unless it
can
be controlled, the H5N1 outbreak in Nigeria could cause a regional
disaster. They say that Africa, the world's poorest continent, where
millions live with domestic poultry in their homes and backyards, is
ill-equipped in terms of health resources and funds to combat the
disease.

--
ProMED-mail
<[e-mail]>

[How to tease fate: make a decision. We had decided to discontinue this
thread because the reports were getting frankly repetitive, and then
this
report emerged of some illuminating epidemiologic investigations in
Nigeria. To turn the hypothesis on the dangers of infected imported
birds
into a theory needs repeated similar examples elsewhere -- but for the
moment it is not so speculative. - Mod.MHJ]