Smuggling of poultry likely spreads bird flu

Elisabeth Rosenthal | the New York Times
Posted April 15, 2006

MILAN, Italy -- Two vans of undercover police inspectors pulled up at a storefront in Milan in March, their target neither terrorists nor drugs.

Picking their way through a refrigerator at the back of a Chinese grocery store off a piazza, the agents found their quarry: bags of duck feet.

Never mind H5N1: virulent outbreaks of bird flu phobia are on the horizon

...Bird flu phobia is separate from avian flu itself and pays no heed to the science of virology. It infects the body politic, spread by what I once heard a top new Labour adviser boastfully describe as the Government’s policy of “organised paranoia”...

Bird flu contingency plans have been tried and tested in Warwickshire following the discovery of a dead swan with the H5N1 strain of the virus in Scotland last week.

Don't play with severed chicken heads.

A dead swan which tested positive for the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu came from outside the UK, government scientists have confirmed. DNA tests showed the dead swan, found in the coastal village of Cellardyke in Fife, was part of a whooper population which migrates from Scandinavia, and northern Russia. ... "This whooper swan probably came from Germany and may have died off the Scottish coast as it struggled across the sea. This raises the likelihood that it had no contact with any native birds and that this case of H5N1 on our shores was a one-off."

Forgive me for not buying this, we find a dead swan and we're pretty sure it didn't meet any other birds in the UK and died in the North Sea on his way from Germany. Whatever...

Bird flu crushes avian influenza

And H5N1 has its way with bird flu panic

Seven Indian poultry farmers have committed suicide after their businesses were destroyed by tumbling prices due to the bird flu scare

My question is: do we include these in the bird-flu casualty total?

Beware of Bolloywood popups!

So a country of nearly a billion confirms birdflu so what do they do? Well, as reverse logic would have it the govt stops sales of their generic Tamiflu med and then the company stops making it due to low demand.
US companies with lots of outsourced work there might want to look over their contingency plans.

Drug major Cipla has put on hold its plans to manufacture 'Anti-flu', the generic version of avian influenza drug, Tamiflu."There is not much demand of the drug as of now.

Only some countries are building their stockpiles as a precaution. So we have put production on hold,"a top company official told TOI.

So just 5 days after reaching 500 we've passed the 1000 download mark.

We thank you for worrying along with us.

Organic Farmers & Growers, which inspects and licenses the vast majority of UK organic eggs and poultry, moved to reassure farmers and consumers that steps were in place to protect the hard won organic status of these products

"All advice, from around the world, is that it is safe to keep eating eggs and poultry even if there is avian flu in the country and the normal rules of cooking food properly should be applied. We would strongly urge consumers not to panic about this and to trust the advice of the Food Standards Agency."

Like if they really felt otherwise they'd issue a PR newswire saying anything different.

Conservationists and artists gathered at the edge of the Great Rift Valley in Kenya on Sunday to put an end to bad publicity they say migratory birds receive as the main vectors for spreading avian flu.


This has kept me up at nights too, what about the poor birds and their image problem? Idiots, like the birds give a crap what we do until the moment we catch and kill them.