Notes from an Environmentalist
Avian flu and Today's Election.
Who is Going to Pardon our Thanksgiving Turkeys?
The New Scourge
While the world is concerned about the next president, virologists are concerned about the next pandemic. We are already in the worst outbreak of avian flu in history.
Over 60 million birds from 160 species out of the 1000 odd species in the United States have died, and epidemiologists fear is could spread to humans and be more deadly than its lethal cousin, Covid-19.
Avian flu has actually been around for decades, sequestered in migratory wild bird populations {mostly dabbling ducks} that have spread the disease to almost every continent.
But the flu becomes a real problem when it infects large scale industrial poultry farms that house up to a hundred thousand overcrowded, stressed and immunocompromised chicken, ducks or turkeys; stumbling around on legs too weak to support their artificially pumped-up weight.
The industrial poultry farms act like giant petri dishes where strains of avian flu shuffle and exchange genetic material to mutate into more virulent strains that can be transmitted to other animals like fox, coyotes, grizzly bears, cows, pigs and humans.
The flocks of poultry never gain natural herd immunity because the birds are not around long enough. They are slaughtered and shipped off to market only five to six months after hatching.
But the real concern is that all the shuffling of genetic material in poultry barns will mutate a strain of the virus that can infect the human upper respiratory tract so we can directly infect other humans without other intermediate animal hosts like cows, pigs or poultry.
When a farmer discovers that his poultry barn has been infected, he cuts off the barn’s cooling system and turns on the heaters until up to a hundred thousand birds are literally roasted alive.
Has he stopped the spread of the disease? No, it has been picked by the many wild swifts and sparrows that also live in the huge barns and can spread the flu to the next field and poultry farm.
So, while the fear is that avian flu could blow up rapidly in the human population the way it has in wild animals and poultry farms in the America’s in just the past five years.
We remain woefully unprepared. So far, we have not been able to vaccinate either humans or poultry to stop an explosive spread of the disease.
If virologists use the traditional method to develop a vaccine, it will take at least 6 months to grow the virus in eggs so health officials are trying to license the same mRNA technology that Moderna used to develop the Covid vaccine.
But today’s election could put us in the midst of an even deadlier pandemic than Covid under a health czar who doesn’t believe in vaccines.
It would be like the Lysenko Affair where the minister of agriculture starved millions of people and ruined Soviet agriculture because he didn’t believe in evolution.