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Bangladesh Slaughters 150,000 Birds After Worst H5N1 Virus Outbreak In 5 Years
An anonymous reader writes in with news about a bird flu outbreak in Bangladesh. "At least 150,000 chickens and 300,000 eggs have been destroyed at a giant poultry farm near Dhaka in Bangladesh after the major outbreak of avian flu was detected last week, officials said Wednesday. This season's bird flu outbreak was the worst in five years. Officials at Bay Agro at Gazipur detected the deadly H5N1 flu strain 25 miles (40 kilometers) north of Dhaka on Monday after dozens of birds died, which had prompted the poultry company to send samples to a laboratory for testing. 'There are about 150,000 chickens at the farm. We have already killed and destroyed 120,000 chickens and we will kill the rest today,' livestock department director Mosaddeq Hossain said, according to AFP. Hossain said that it was the worst avian flu outbreak in five years."
A friend of mine owns a small chicken farm (dozens of chickens), and had to shoot all of his when they caught the bird flu. How do you kill and dispose of millions of pounds of chicken?
The issue here is that these companies are taking shortcuts, esp. WRT animal density. As such, you have an easy chance of contamination.
Sadly, this same thing goes on with farmed fish/shrimp throughout Asia, which is leading to some new bugs that will be arriving on these to the west.
Now, why should the west be concerned? Because all too often, weastern companies, such as safeway, ignore safety issues. Safeway will actually use chicken from Asia. Likewise, they get a lot of farmed fish/shellfish from Asia/South America.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I know you are going WTF? at my header but read on...
Some years ago there was a large scale out break of Bird Flu in my country. Naturally the government called for a massive cull...
And while most (all normal people?) avoided all chicken and eggs, *some* people decided to take advantage of the sudden plummet in chicken prices.
I shit you not, when I heard that a family in the neighbourhood sped up their son's wedding date significantly to take advantage of all that cheap, cheap chicken...
Oh sure, apparently if you cook the chicken thoroughly the chances of catching the virus a minimum, but still... we decide to give that invitation a pass...
So my dear Bangladeshi friends, take it from a fellow South Asian: If you get a sudden invite to a party or wedding, give it a pass...
I am an ACCA student. Got a query on Accountancy/Finance? Maybe I can help!
...Mosaddeq, the Destroyer of Chickens!
...totally killed my duck.
Now the chickens are going to want their own little country, I suppose?
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
And so it begins.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
How are they going to eat?
I recently visited a poultry farm. The big surprise there was the density of the farm: a single building, maybe 50x30 m housed 60,000 chickens. Now this was a farm that complies with 'free range' criteria, but there's still ~40 chickens per m^2 (in ~6 levels in a column of 2.5 m high). So the 150k chickens would fit in less than a hectare. The numbers involved in chicken farming boggle the mind.
I watched this on Netflix. Makes you want to give up meat altogether.
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
they will be eating well there...
Oh sure, apparently if you cook the chicken thoroughly the chances of catching the virus a minimum, but still..
Influenza is a virus. It's a thing which spread from one living being to another. It has nothing to do with your food. *You* could eat sicked chicken without any risk as long as it's dead and cooked (and you have to cook poultry thoroughly if you don't want to have a big food poisoning problems anyway).
Also, birdflu is a *BIRD* disease, humans normally don't catch it under normal circumstances. (The 'H5' receptor on the virus only binds to chicken cells. You need H1 or H3 to bind to human cells easily if my memory serves me right) So even if you have a sick chicken in your house, chance are almost nothing would probably happen to you.
The problem is not *you*. The problem with is with the high density of birds in those farms and their massive (over-)population.
If one single chicken catches the bird flu, it can spread very quickly to the whole farm, then neighbouring farm, then the whole region (same as human flu at a workplace in a densely populated area).
If you don't stop the disease today, by killing the 150'000 chicken who were in direct contact with a sick chicken (and could catch it) today, then in a few days, you'll have a dozen of million of sick birds on your hands and a massive epidemiological problem. (Same with humans: If you don't stay at home when you're sick, you're going to make all your colleagues sick and before you know, the whole building housing your workplace is full of cick people).
In addition to that, if there's such a massive amount of virus spreading around, there's a tiny bit of risk that "by error" a virus infects a human who is a lot in contact with the chickens and the bird epidemic (and by "a lot" i really mean "a lot". As in "the farmer who work in the chicken farm everyday". Not as in "some random guy who happen to eat chicken").
For the human him-/her-self this isn't necessarily bad news (in a big city, in theory... sadly we're usually speaking about very poor farmers in remote area, so their accessibility to proper treatment is very likely to be sub-optimal). Nor is it a direct danger for other humans around (it was already a big amount of luck that the *bird* virus managed to infect a human. Jumping from that point onward to another human *again* is like winning a lottery 2 times in a row: *very* unlikely).
But due to the peculiarities of influenza genetics, inside the human the bird flu virus could get mixed with a human flu it the human has it too. (The bird flu stealing the gene for the correct receptor to be able to efficiently bind and infect human cells). The same could also happen inside an animal which could catch both flu at the same time (pigs can occasionally catch bird flu, and pigs can also catch human flu - this a pig could also serve this role of mixer).
And *this* mutant hybrid would be problematic because this new humanized bird flu could cause an epidemic among the human population.
In short, the sick chickens aren't dangerous for humans. They are not killed because of that. The reason they are killed is to stop the bird flu spreading and causing an epidemics among the birds. And also to lower the risk that 1 virus manage to win the lottery and become a human-infecting hybrid and in turn cause a human epidemic.
But the flesh is perfectly edible. You can safely eat chicken, and you can safely take advantage of the lower prices.
(It's a different situation than the mad cow disease.
Mad cow disease is due to a protein, which survives cooking.
Bird flu is due to a virus, which requires a living bird, and doesn't infect humans anyway).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
In Finland, my pet duck has to be kept indoors for two months every spring, as required by the authorities. It was also mandatory for me to register the duck, so that the authorities can come to check him out, if they so wish. I don't recall there ever having been a single bird flu incident in this country.
Madagascar closes its port.
Nouvelles de jeux et technologies en français. TC
I would like to know, what a moron designed chicken coop for 150k chicks and what a moron financed that?
It is known since Victorian era that birds breathe feast, and this must have access to fresh air, more then other domesticated animals.
Cramping that many chickens, combined with their tons of poop, ends up with outbreaks.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68hapDEQEj0
Play real life Angry Birds?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Please stop linking medicaldaily.com. One auto-playing video ad is bad enough, but it has 2 auto-playing video ads with unsynced or different sound all-together.
There is signifcant risk. You can get sick from eating it.
NO. YOU. CAN'T.
First and fore most:
- Influenza is a virus.
- It doesn't have a biochemistry of its own, it must use its host's. outside of a cell it's just an inert object.
- It is produced by one infected cell in the sick individual. And needs to reach a fresh cell within its (short) life time.
(its a virus containing RNA, and not encapsulated in a protein shell but in a lipid membrance. This means it won't survive long without a host cell whose biochemistry to use).
In short: that means that it must be quickly sneezed onto someone else (aerosol and particulate transmission). IT CANNOT STAY LURKING FOR A LONG TIME OUTSIDE IT'S PREVIOUS HOST UNTIL IT MEETS A NEW ONE.
This a *virus* (and a fragile one). Not a *bacteria*, not a *bacteria's spore*. Not a parasite. Nor one of the few more durable viruses wich might, under the right condition, resist a longer time until finding a new host (HIV viruses hidden inside the needle of a used syringe can survive a few hours before finding a new host)
- That means you need a living host, with living cell secreting viruses to transmit it.
- A fried émicé in a nice curry sauce sevred along a side dish of rice *DEFINITELY FAILS* the "living cell" definition.
Also, if you're cooking impaired:
- poultry meat is ALWAYS served thoroughly cooked. chicken are rather filthy animals and if you don't cook their meat, you're at high risk of food poisoning due to parasites, bacteria, and other stuff. Influenza is the least of your problems. YOU CAN'T EAT CHICKEN RAW.
- cooking destroys and sterilise almost anything (the only exception are prions. prions could somewhat survive some amount of cooking and still be able to replicate afterward. mad cow disease CAN BE transmitted by cooked food, but that's an exception)
- viruses will be *COMPLETELY DESTROYED* during the cooking (along with all the other bad stuff. this make the food safe and edible. cooking was invented exactly for this purpose) the only usual risks that remain after cooking are non infectious but chemical (pollution, toxins, poison).
Last but not least:
- Avian flu (H5N1) is *A. BIRD. DISEASE*.
- It's got a Haemagglutinin 5 (H5) on its surface - that's were it's codename comes from.
- H5 binds to bird cell. It can easily infect birds.
- H1, H2 and H3 are the one binding to human cells. You would need on of these to infect humans.
- It can only *very very very rarely* enter a human host, only by sheer luck, almost *by error*. We're speaking about a few dozens of individuals each year during avian flu outbreaks, and this is mostly the poeple who are exposed to birds a lot (the farmers handling them working in the overcrowded farms with thousand of chicken cramed in a small place. not the guy eating a chicken wing).
So even if the virus was magically able to survive a long time outside a living host (it doesn't) AND even if the virus was able to magically survive cooking (it doesn't neither) chance for catching avian flu through eating are close to none.
On the other hand, if you're a poor farmer working daily on a farm with thousands of chickens packed together and if an avian flu epidemic spreads among your flock, there's a small chance for you to catch it to. (And sadly for you, because you're a poor farmer in the backland and not a wealthy citizen in the big city, you will let the disease evolve without treatment, hoping that it will end on its own, and you might have a complication, like a pneumonia).
In short:
- You can catch bird flu, if you're a living bird and another living bird sneeze on you.
(Among birds, the oro-fecal pathway works too. Don't peck neither on other birds' fresh shit)
- You can catch bird flu, if you're a (living) human and you got sneezed on by sick birds several thousand times a day in the tiny overcrowded farm where you work and you are not lucky.
If you're already sick and *really not lucky a
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
You call yourself a vegan, but you're not affected by the slaughter of 150,000 animals? Asshole.
It is pretty funny that so much money is expend every year and so litle significative advances are reached. Before the backslash...I agree some significative improvements are reached after a thousand small steps, but what I want emphasize is the litle direct attack to the problem at task. We have bird flu and we start to research about it, we want to know every litle detail, we believe that if we can fullfil the database of knoledge about it the cure will appear by miracle in our faces. I agree that knowing more a more may increase the chances of finding a solution, but what about a direct attack? This is what I know about the dissease and now I'm gonna spend days, weeks, months thinking how to solve the issue, what technical or technological improvements may achieve it. Unforunatedly research to often correlates to re-search, rere-search, rerere-search, others may find familiar sampling, resampling, reresampling, pippeting, up,down,updown...we are lazy when it comes to think but can spend a ton of minutes doing repetitive tasks...
Then why did 6 people die already from it? I thought you said humans can't get the virus?
Yup, a dozen of people caught the disease, out of whom 6 died.
Now to put things into perspective, according to WHO, each season, regular human flu infection gets *half a dozen millions* of individuals out of which *up to half a million* die.
The number of "bird flu in humans" is so small that it looks like a fluke. As I said before :
It can only *very very very rarely* enter a human host, only by sheer luck, almost *by error*. We're speaking about a few dozens of individuals each year during avian flu outbreaks, and this is mostly the poeple who are exposed to birds a lot (the farmers handling them working in the overcrowded farms with thousand of chicken cramed in a small place. not the guy eating a chicken wing).
Life sciences are not hardcore-hard sciences. You can never say "never" nor "always". There will always be some weird exception. If you start digging literature for weird case reports you could probably even find single digit occurrences of probable infection by things for which we aren't even the normally taxonomic phylum (who knows that one single virus might have a just that critical mutation just right before jumping onto you). FFS, the human genome contains genes which originally come from life forms to which we aren't even evolutionarily related (if you're curious, it's called "Horizontal Gene Transfer", normally *bacteria* are the ones doing it a lot, but well, never say "never", apparently even the human genome stole a few genes this way).
If you're that much concerned about getting avian flu, go play the lottery instead. Your odds are better at winning cash than catching bird-cold.
Now to back to the poor schmucks who died of avian flu:
- They are people who get exposed to birds a lot (I mention farmers, DigiShaman mentions cock fighting handlers). They get exposed tu much more massive amount of virus. More viruses are playing the "let's try to hop to a human" game, odds of 1 of them winning this game are higher.
- As I mentioned before, these aren't rich westerner in a big modern rich city, they are poor guys in backwaters. Once these get sick, they don't have an as easy access to proper treatments as the former. And risks to get a complication (pneumonia) are higher for them.
(- And for the biologically inclined there might be a - though less important, but interesting - 3rd factor. As this is a bird disease, it looks a lot less like previous seasons' flu than the regular human flu, and thus the white blood cells have a lot less "prior knowledge" to leverage in fighting this peculiar disease. In biological term: chances are lower that one of the "memory B and T cells" have a receptor which more or less works a tiny bit with the newer virus. Same reasons why the last swine flu could more easily infect younger people than the previous flu: it didn't look like anything we've seen since in the last 60 years).
So even if you managed to win the lottery and catch avian flu: ...if you happen to have a normal human flu virus inside you at the same time, due to the special way in which influenza genetics works, then there's a risk that both will mix and produce a hybrid which has the human flu's ability to bind to and infect human cells easily.
- your personal odds at surviving it are much higher as you'll seek a doctor if you don't feel well and you do have access to proper medication.
- you will probably NOT be dangerous to people around you: the 1 virus who got you has had an enormous chance of managing to infect you across specie barrier. To infect another human, it would need to have the same luck twice in a row. *very-very-very* unlikely... but...
-
(Same logic as above also applies to pigs but with a much higher risk for them catching a bird flu)
So I stand by what I've said befor
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
If you are going to be presenting your self as knowledgeable on the subject, then you need to refrain from saying 'long time' it's vague.
Under regular conditions, its in the range of minutes, maybe up to hours.
RNA isn't that stable. (In labs, it needs to be handled specially. You need to either freeze it a deep temperatures (you put your RNA samples in the -80C freezer) or copy/convert it to DNA (use a reverse-transcriptase to make much more stable DNA out of it).
The number one way ti's transmitted bird to bird is through shared drinking water.
...as in one birds poops into the water while another is drinking (= oro-fecal pathway I mentioned 2 levels higher in the thread). Not as in 2 birds which happen to drink from the same river a few apart. You need a time frame of a few minutes up to a couple of hours max.
(In birds, poop contains the biggest amount of virus, and as it moist and protects from light, viruses have the highest chance for surviving a longer time).
It's the bird's equivalent of humans sneezing on each other's face. (You can catch flu this way. Whereas, your risks of catching flu by walking in the same room as where someone sneeze the day before are bleak) (in humans that's aerosol/particulate transmission).
But handling raw chicken with the virus can cause it to spread.
By the time the chicken reaches the kitchen, most of the virus will probably have died/become inactive. Chance of transmission at this point in the chain of the poultry production are low. But are much higher at the other side of the chain.
At some point of time the dead chicken in your dish (and in the kitchen of the restaurant where you're eating) used to be alive (I realise that I'm starting to sound like a Monthy Python's sketch).
This chicken has been slaughtered, de feathered, butchered and otherwise conditioned before being sent to the restaurant.
At that point of time, the chicken was alive not so long ago (so there should be still active virus in it), and the whole preparation is bound to release quite a lot of the virus in the air. People working at this point in the chain (very often the farmers themselves) are at a higher risk.
We're still speaking of only a dozen of people per year, though.
Now the problem is that this transmission (bird-to-human) is so rare, that we don't really have enough stats to support this kind of conclusion. All I can say is that all the bird-to-human transmission I've heard about in the past were in people handling the birds (farmers, and the like), none of them were people working in the kitchen of restaurants service poultry, nor people eating chicken.
But well, with such a small pool (a dozen of cases per year) nothing is really 100% sure. We definitely lack enough data to give the exact life-time of a virus, or the odds of infection at each precise stage of poultry preparation, between the farm all the way to your dish.
And any way, this is bio science, not hardcore-hard science. Anything can happen anyway (although we're slowly drifting into the kind of "anything" territory, as western people in big city catching malaria although they've never travelled abroad ever, but just happen to live near an airport, and managed to get bitten by a mosquito which travelled all the way from Africa while trapped on a plain. This kind of Rube Goldbergesque situation does happen, but we're speaking single-digit amount of cases in total)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]