Bird flu blog
Antoine is the international editor of Pharma Marketletter, and a total anorak on anything related to the healthcare industry and public health. He has been studying bird flu for about a year now, doing daily research into its spread and tracking the indicators that scientists and market traders are watching. So it’s good that he’s going to start making all that practical insight accessible and searchable to the rest of us, with his avian flu blog. I feel particularly glad for that now, having read some of his posts about bird flu, which contain information I’m sure he’s told me hundreds of times, but which I couldn’t really get a grip on until I’d read on the page. Such as:
Chickens and eggs are the two most likely sources of human infection. If both are cooked before you come near them there is no reason to worry (at least I’m pretty sure, and I would trust that myself). However, if like me you like to buy free range eggs by opening the box and checking the contents for cracks then I reckon that’s going to be suicidal if local chickens are infected and somehow the eggs got into the stores. For environmental sceptics there is the joy of knowing that battery hens are safe in their crowded and inhumane pens, their eggs will be the last to be infected. Better still, for party-poopers, the only “organic chickens” left in the UK will probably be pumped full of vaccines and antibiotics to keep them from catching H5N1 from a passing protected wildfowl.
Antoine also passes on evidence that Michael Fumento is an ignorant tool, but then we already knew that.
Filed under: Life
There probably is a greater risk of bird ‘flu infecting humans in the UK that out here in Australia. Here the most likely cause of infection will be from someone arriving by plane who’s been in contact with H5N1.
Any infected waterfowl are likely to have died before they arrive here.
We run a small free range egg farm and there is no way it would be possible for us to lock up our hens. If that ever became a requirement we would have no option but to kill the lost.
Check out our website at http://www.freeranger.com.au and our blog at http://freerangereggs.blogspot.com
You know the thing I don’t get about these “outbreaks” is how big a deal they are one year and then a few years later they are back page stuff. Like ebola or e-coli or sars (I may be off, technically on some) but they all seem to be huge impending scares that never really materialize.
The only that seemed to was AIDS.