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UK Researchers Developing Influenza-Resistant Birds
New submitter ravensmith0821 writes: UK researchers are working on disease-resistant chickens, adding a gene to eggs before they hatch that renders the bird less susceptible to avian influenza. Reuters reports: "Their research, which has been backed by the UK government and top chicken companies, could potentially prevent repeats of this year's wipeout: 48 million chickens and turkeys killed because of the disease since December in the United States alone. But these promising chickens - injected with a fluorescent protein to distinguish them from normal birds in experiments - won't likely gatecrash their way into poultry production any time soon. Health regulators around the world have yet to approve any animals bred as genetically modified organisms (GMOs) for use in food because of long-standing safety and environmental concerns."
There likely is no drawback.
The reason it has no immunity to it is due to the way flu viruses work.
Their genome is highly unstable, large clumps of it switching around all the time.
Successful strains thrive, the (mostly) unsuccessful ones die in the host it infected.
It likely also means that the genome itself is fairly new, evolution-speaking. Or it simply is too random and unpredictable for the body to mount a defence yet.
Evolution is pretty slow, after all.
We still don't know for sure if there are people out there that are immune to them. Or classes of them.
We only just found out recently that there were people immune to large classes of retroviruses like HIV. (which seemed to have developed back in the days of the black plague that wiped out so many people)
Those people were used to develop the first possible treatment (which was tested and partially succeeded) for HIV.
The same methodology was also used to treat HPV which is a pretty large case of causing cancer in females, one of the most successful treatments against an oncovirus to date as far as I know. The adverse reactions to it were also fairly low from what I know.
It is also being used to look at other cancers and using viruses to help create immunity to them.
Exciting times for cancer research due to this breakthrough in immune research.
Also, don't forget our seedless fruits. They are pretty self-defeating too.
But damn do I love seedless grapes. Fuck seeds.
UK researchers are working on disease-resistant chickens, adding a gene to eggs before they hatch that renders the bird less susceptible to avian influenza.
Good. I remember growing up in Honduras where most people in the cities, out of necessity raise their own poultry, my family included. On the country side it is obvious, but not so in the cities, in the poor neighborhoods unless you live in them.
And every awful year, around August, an avian flu would just move across the region, and bro, poultry would die by the thousands. Industrial-level farms would survive it given that their animals were isolated. Poor people in isolated villages would also fare well with their poultry animals.
But subsistence urban farmers like us, that pestilence would just kill our animals, our only source of affordable meat and eggs. We tried everything - immunization, injection of vitamins prior to the expected pestilence, covering the pens, the floors and walls with ash and limestone (very powerful antiseptic.) Nothing,nothing will work.
Animals would die by the thousands, thousands and thousands, and we had nothing left to do but to burning the carcasses in pits.
After many years, we had an epiphany and we started raising Muscovy ducks which are resilient to this pestilence. We had to make adjustments in our little backyard for the animals, but it worked well. When the next round of influenza came, our house was the only one with standing, aliven-n-kicking poultry.
After that, everyone who could spare the extra space needed for ducks caught on the the idea and made the switch.
So, although we were able to adapt, many cannot for a variety of reasons. Avian flu has a cost, and a very hard one for poor people in developing countries.
People in the 1st world sometimes ignore these nuisances and forget that experiments like this can make the difference between children eating an egg a day or just eating boiled millet.
I can understand the preoccupation with altering the environment, but me, knowing what it is like to grow poor and what it is like to spend days without eating any type of protein, I say to these scientists, go for it.