November 26th: Madness from the world of “Bird Flu”…

Congratulations to all those of us who’ve been saying that knee-jerk Governments world-wide might just start killing wild birds to prevent the spread of “bird flu” - even though it’s not been proven to be spread by wild birds but is endemic in poultry: a “Told-you-so Award” comes courtesy of the enlightened and wildlife-friendly Vietnamese Government.

This from www.alertnet.org:
‘Viet Nam’s commercial hub Ho Chi Minh City has begun poisoning pigeons and other wild birds as it moves to prevent avian flu from spreading into the crowded city, an official said on Friday [25 Nov 2005].

“We will make sure that no birds are left in the city to minimize the risk of bird flu,” Huynh Huu Loi, Director of Ho Chi Minh City’s Animal Health Department, told Reuters. Loi said beside the poisoning campaign, city authorities would also move pet birds outside the city until Vietnam is free of bird flu.’

Mr Loi: now there’s a man who knows how to take decisive action - no matter how ignorant, pointless, and ill-informed it might be…

November 30th: Even More madness from the world of Poultry Flu…

As anyone who’s ever spent any time looking at this blog will know, I - along with a few other lone voices - have been saying for months that the Poultry/Bird Flu scare is hugely over-hyped, that we don’t believe that any future pandemic would be spread by migratory birds (they die when they catch avian flu), and that any problem really lies with the way POULTRY is treated, kept and transported.

I get no pleasure at all, though, in reporting a story from today’s Guardian (UK) newspaper which is headlined “Poultry from China sparks search for illegal meat”. The sorry tale concerns a meat wholesaler based in Ireland called Eurofreeze (Ireland) Ltd who has been caught selling piles of chicken sourced from China - the epicentre of the Flu outbreaks. As the Guardian says, “The EU currently bans the import of live birds and poultry meat from China as a precautionary measure to prevent the spread of bird flu and because residues of illegal antibiotics have been found in the past.”

Gary McFarlane, director of the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health in Northern Ireland, is also quoted in the Guardian’s report saying: “The ‘farm to fork’ cycle now typically involves multiple international borders, thousands of miles, and numerous pairs of hands in the commercial sector. The movement of food in this way, coupled with its clear capacity to act as a vehicle for disease, means that the potential threat to public health has increased.”

The good folk at Eurofeeze, according to the Guardian, “declined to comment yesterday and would not accept any calls. The company’s pet food operation on the same site has also had its licence suspended, according to the Food Standards Agency.”

Millions and millions of healthy birds have been killed to stop “flu” from spreading to people. Impressionable - but obviously frightened - people all over the world have been queueing up to have flu viruses injected into themselves in a futile attempt to protect themselves from a virus that as yet doesn’t even exist (any pandemic-causing virus will have to be a mutation or a “mixing” of H5N1 and a human flu virus). Just how stupid and selfish do you have to be to smuggle potentially contaminated meat? I’m getting more and more convinced that for some reason I can’t grasp we’re Hell bent on killing ourselves off. And the process is being helped by a few morons who want to make a little bit of money before the whole house of cards we call the “world market” comes crashing down…

December 3rd: The FAO - wallowing in the sh*t they helped create themselves…

A day or two ago the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) warned against culls of wild birds in cities in countries affected by bird flu, saying “this could distract attention from the campaign to contain the disease among poultry.”

The warning followed reports that wild birds were being killed in Ho Chi Minh City in Viet Nam as a precautionary measure. Juan Lubroth, FAO senior officer responsible for infectious animal diseases, commented: “This is unlikely to make any significant contribution to the protection of humans against avian influenza.”

He added: “There are other, much more important measures to be considered that deserve priority attention. Fighting the disease in poultry must remain the main focus of attention.”

BREATHTAKING…

Along with the World Health Organisation, the FAO has spent the whole of the summer and the autumn telling governments world-wide that migratory birds carry “Bird Flu”. The information they send out is what many governments base their decisions on. It’s not FAO’s fault that poultry is kept in such appalling conditions, but as the organisations that Governments listen to if their advice had been data-driven rather than fear-driven a lot of healthy birds would still be alive today.