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The Poultry Keeper
The Independent Forum for Poultry Keepers
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stephen
Site Admin
Joined: 13 Apr 2005
Posts: 4858
Location: Billinge, Skåne, Sweden.
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 Posted: Wed Jun 07, 2006 5:43 pm Post subject: Not the backyard poultry keepers fault |
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After nearly a month and no posts on it (which has to be good news!), here is another little tit bit of good news.
Here is a small snippet. If you haven't already registered with The Guardian, it's worth it for this article alone.
| Quote: | 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. |
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summayah
Joined: 14 Apr 2005
Posts: 4289
Location: luton
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| Posted: Wed Jun 07, 2006 8:26 pm Post subject: |
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| Thanks Stephen it's nice to find a good article ~ although to be fair the broadsheet internet sites have had quitea number of sensible reports thoughout the whole thing ~ but it's still nice to read. |
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Fenn
Joined: 16 Jun 2005
Posts: 2292
Location: Shrewsbury
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| Posted: Sat Jun 10, 2006 11:20 am Post subject: |
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Well that's nice to read 
I've been getting mighty fed up with people telling me that it's ok to eat intensively-produced poultry and eggs all of a sudden, just because they've been kept indoors 
The more ignorant members of my family are horrified that I've still got chickens and even more horrified that I still cuddle them. And -gasp- let my children cuddle them as well  
When my mum visits, she spends all of her time telling my boys to wash their hands...  |
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