Re: AsianAvian Birdflu

[Judith Rosen <***>]

John M.

You've made quite a few assumptions about how the chickens are raised, what they are fed, and what their behavior is-- there's a lot more to the story. As for mad cow disease, there's a lot more to that story, as well. I went into deep-research mode when the infected cow was found in North America and was horrified by what I learned. I've posted some of this information in the past, by the way. Basically, both epidemics stem from very poor "animal husbandry" practices which have developed within the factory farming trend. Number one is over-crowding. That's the mono-culture, right there. It also tends to cause unsanitary conditions which can breed further disease and generally weaken the animals. Factory farms compensate for this via routine use of antibiotics and fungicides, which encourages resistant pathogens to evolve. Number two is pushing rapid growth over health, including the use of hormones if necessary. Number three is the feed: among other things, I'm afraid that chickens ARE being forced to eat chickens and other animals as well. Large multinational companies like Cargill have "closed the loop" in the food industry by buying up factory farms, feedlots (where the animals are raised), slaughterhouses, and animal feed manufacturing companies-- where they actually use the offal from the slaughterhouses to manufacture feed for new animals. Before regulation stepped in, they were making cannibals of most of our meat animals, which are vegetarian by nature. And THAT is how mad cow disease has been turned into an epidemic.

Yes, in the absence of "animal by-products" in the feed, the only way for new animals to be infected with the prions (other than being born to an infected mother) was to ingest grass in pastures that others of the same species spent a lot of time in (including giving birth in, because the blood carries the most prions, of all body fluids, as far as is currently known). The prions persist for a long time; no one knows how long, but they are damn near impossible to kill! Heat doesn't kill them, acid doesn't kill them, it's really scary what I found on the World Health Organization website about "how to sterilize surgical equipment that has been used on someone with mad cow disease" or the human version-- basically, you can't. They said the best you can do is to soak the equipment in powerful acid for several hours and then autoclave, but that may not eliminate all danger of contagion. I have read several accounts describing how it is possible to incinerate the surgical instruments until there's nothing left but ash, and still isolate viable prions in the residue. I don't understand that, I really don't.

Back on the ranch... The problem hasn't been eliminated with the regulations prohibiting cannibal-feed because these multinational companies are so huge, they have numerous ways to get around such regulation. For example, a law was enacted prohibiting feeding the slaughterhouse by-products of animals to the same species in their feed. However, it's become a shell game, whereby cows are fed to various other animals and various other animals are fed back to cows. In one of the more disgusting revelations, which I remember posting to the list, I found that soiled chicken litter was being recycled as "winter feed" for cows-- the company did a nutritional analysis of soiled chicken litter and the numbers turned up to look even better than the regular winter feed. But they feed cow by-products to chickens! The slaughterhouses are also not segregated by species: cows and sheep and pigs may all be "processed" in the same facility, which means that the blood and tissue become commingled to some degree. Given how infectious prions are when blood is on surgical instruments...

With the avian flu, I confess I haven't researched how it mutated, etc. However, it should come as no surprise that a new strain is causing an epidemic because the overcrowding alone would be sufficient to lead to an epidemic. Closer to home, salmonella has become a fact of life with factory farmed chickens and eggs because of the unsanitary and overcrowded conditions on these farms (not to mention the slaughterhouses).  Since the avian flu can spread to other birds and to humans, there is no longer any way to contain it. (Birds do sneeze and cough, by the way, and I'm not sure about chickens, but many species of birds certainly exchange body fluids beak to beak, if you want to call that "kissing". My parakeets do a lot of "feeding" each other, which involves regurgitating partially digested food... ick! But it's one of the ways social bonds are maintained within a community of birds.)

These multi-national companies (I know of about a half-dozen, but I'm sure there must be more) are huge, with gross annual profits in the tens of billions. They are entrenched in countries all over the world and when they are regulated too much for comfort in one country, they can just switch their distribution to get around the laws and then re-introduce the product as a new import. In an ominous new development in this situation, these same companies are also the ones pushing research and development of genetically engineered food crops. For example, Cargill donates vast amounts of money to big agricultural universities for the purpose of developing and testing the various combinations and permutations. Often, the crops aren't being engineered to taste better or to be more nutritious... they are being engineered to be resistant to the weed-killing chemicals that can then be sprayed on the fields, decreasing the toll weeds can wreak, by competing with the crop for nutrients and water, etc. They are also being engineered to produce their own pesticides. This is one of Dr. Mae-Wan Ho's biggest areas of concentration, and most of her newsletters are on some aspect of this subject. According to her, animals are almost universal in their aversion to genetically engineered feed, when given a choice between that and natural feed. She also says there are links between the genetically engineered feed and birth defects or other pathological side-effects in animals forced to eat it.

In any case, the whole situation of how our species has taken the machine metaphor to an extreme and applied it to growing/producing our food is clearly gone badly wrong and the solution is organic meat and produce. The produce may cost more, but it has also been proven via analysis to be a great deal more nutritious as well. Factory farmed produce is now a nutritional shadow of its former self and the causes have been traced, in part, to the depletion of bio-diversity in soil ecosystems that heavy use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides cause. Factory farms also routinely spray antibiotics on fields of crops, which I find rather mind-blowing. That's so unbelievably stupid! We're just asking for trouble-- have been for decades-- and with the avian flu it looks like trouble has arrived.

Judith
PS: At least the causes of the avian flu epidemic don't involve molesting the chickens! The story of how syphilis became a human disease and an epidemic as well are even more unwholesome! Syphilis used to be purely a sheep scourge, once upon a time.
Web address: http://www.rosen-enterprises.com
BioTheory: An electronic journal of general science based on the Relational (Rosennean) Complexity Paradigm
On Oct 29, 2005, at 4:51 PM, John M wrote:

> To all listers experted in envirobiology,
> zoocomplexity and other relational mental brilliance,
>
> here is a question:
> We all can't wait until the avian flu decimates us.
> OK, we eat infected chikens and thus ingest the virus.
> So WE beciome sick. We then sneez, kiss and caugh on
> each other to spread the deadly virus. But:
> How do birds become sick?
> They don't sneez, don't caught, don't kiss and don't
> eat each other. Cows got the madness by grassing on
> infected pastures on what mad cows devoured before
> leaving their saliva on the remnant blades of grass. 
> Birds don't graze. Birds eat in their privacy: find a
> grain and eat it. They don't bother about the
> excrement of other birds either. And feather is a good
> protector.
>
> Insects, Maybe? but in that case insecticides could
> save the world? A flee-safe henhouse? Any ideas? 
> This may be a life-complexity question.
>
> John Mikes