So who's really to blame for bird flu? and why put yourselves at risk!

News
Sport
Comment
So who's really to blame for bird flu?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2006/jun/07/health.lifeandhealth1/print
According to experts, wild birds are spreading the deadly H5N1 virus
that's wiping out poultry worldwide. But are they really to blame? Or
is the disease not only a direct result of intensive farming - but
actually being spread by the industry? Joanna Blythman reports
Joanna Blythman The Guardian, Wednesday June 7 2006 Article historyIf
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.

· Joanna Blythman's new book, Bad Food Britain - How A Nation Ruined
Its Appetite, is published by Fourth Estate, price £7.99.

About this articleClose This article appeared in the Guardian on
Wednesday June 07 2006 on p10 of the Comment & features section. It
was last updated at 08:43 on June 07 2006.
.