Bird Flu In California?

4 pelicans have been detained in California. They say they were acting drunk and one of the birds also crashed into the windshield of a car. The birds are now being tested and the public are asked to be on the lookout for birds acting "drunk", disoriented or being in an unusual place. The thing is..., these birds are actually showing symptoms of having the bird flu, and they are asking people to be on the lookout for birds showing bird flu symptoms (without actually saying so). I've seen numerous reports in different media about this "drunken pelicans" story. All of the articles say that these pelicans might be "drunk on sea algae", they don't mention bird flu at all and they have this little story mentioning Hitchcock's movie "The birds" to spice up the story.


I wonder what those tests will show, and I wonder if they'll go public if the birds are found to be infected with the bird flu...

...or I could be wrong in my speculation and the birds were actually drunk on sea algae. I just found it strange because the symptoms of bird flu are: "birds acting "drunk", disoriented or being in an unusual place". Unless there is a field with lots of dead birds (like a battlefield). It depends on the bird's species how fast they evt. die. I bet somebody has interests in keeping a bird flu outbreak a secret? And many people would loose a lot of money if it were known. Or maybe they're waiting for the test results before they go public? I guess we'll find out...

[edit on 2006/6/25 by Hellmutt]

I don't know but it would be interesting to see how it unfolds. I think all gov's are under the gun about the bird flu. Countries to date have been blamed for withholding information about their regions and uncounted cases so I don't think that our gov given other affairs that we are involved in would hide any cases once confirmed.
What I do think they would do would be delay the infomation as long as possible because as soon as someone confirms bird flu in this country people are going to panic even though it may be random cases or only isolates related strictly to the bird population.

With that said. I don't recall their being any cases to date regardling pelicans without there being other birds within the same region dropping dead as well. You start seeing that happen and your suspicious would probably be right on target.

I just found this. Coincident?

Again I wouldn't be too alarmed at that statement. Cali like New York are high profile so it would at least to me make sense that a statement would go out stating what a state that size would do in the case of event. I wouldn't be surprised given the incident in Canada for NY to come foward soon and make a similar suggestion.