Bird Flu Follows Trade - Not Migration Routes

...migratory birds have been widely and repeatedly blamed for outbreaks that have subsequently been found to originate in the movement of live poultry and products such as poultry meat. ...a misdirected emphasis on contacts between wild birds and outdoor poultry may lead to a reversion to intensive indoor poultry rearing, which actually increases the risk of outbreaks.

Bird flu: a bonanza for 'Big Chicken'

The bird flu crisis rages on. One year ago, when governments were fixated on getting surveillance teams into wetlands and the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) was waving the finger of blame at Asia and Africa's abundant household poultry, GRAIN and other groups pointed out that large-scale industrial poultry farms and the global poultry trade were spreading bird flu -- not wild birds nor backyard flocks. Today, this has become common knowledge, even though little is being done to control the industrial source of the problem, and governments still shamelessly roll out the wild bird theory to dodge responsibility. Just a few weeks ago, Moscow authorities blamed migratory birds for an outbreak near the city -- in the middle of the Russian winter.

A more sinister dimension of the bird flu crisis, however, is becoming more apparent. Last year, we warned that bird flu was being used to advance the interests of powerful corporations, putting the livelihoods and health of millions of people in jeopardy. Today, more than ever, agribusiness is using the calamity to consolidate its farm-to-factory-to-supermarket food chains as its small-scale competition is criminalised, while pharmaceutical companies mine the goodwill invested in the global database of flu samples to profit from desperate, captive vaccine markets. Two UN agencies -- FAO and the World Health Organisation (WHO) -- remain at the centre of this story, using their international stature, access to governments and control over the flow of donor funds to advance corporate agendas.

Slaughtering the small poultry sector

Authorities in charge of dealing with bird flu are finally acknowledging the role played by the poultry trade in spreading the virus. This is long overdue. The first bird flu outbreaks in Southeast Asia -- Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos and Indonesia -- occurred in closed, intensive factory farms. But thorough investigations were never made into why the disease broke out on those farms and how it subsequently spread from there. The same goes for Turkey and Egypt, where wild birds and backyard flocks were quickly condemned while the poultry companies, which supplied markets and "backyard" producers with birds as the disease raged through the industry, were left off the hook. Even in South Korea, with healthy free-range poultry roaming next toh factory farms hit by the disease, authorities are obsessed with the role of wild birds. It was only in the UK this past February that the myth that large farms are "biosecure" was shattered and the shroud concealing the many ways that bird flu spreads through the transnational poultry industry was torn off. Government officials at first blamed wild birds for the outbreak on a large factory farm owned by poultry giant Bernard Matthews and the company dismissed media reports about a possible link with its operations in Hungary, saying that these were far from the area in that country where bird flu recently broke out. But both explanations fell apart when a government inspector found a wrapper on the company's UK premises proving that meat from a slaughterhouse in Hungary's bird-flu infected area had indeed been processed at the UK factory farm just prior to the outbreak.

Yet back in the Asian epicentre of the crisis, the message to poultry farmers is still, "Get big, really big, or get out."

Experts fear bird-flu virus would mutate
March 24, 2007

Experts Friday voiced concern over the possibility that the two different genotypes, called "sub-clades", of the H5N1 bird-flu virus found in Thailand could meet and merge into an unknown and "unpredictable" mutated form.

A Chulalongkorn University has found that a virus sample from Nakhon Phanom province in the Northeast was of a strain newly observed in Thailand and more closely related to H5N1 strains that have been circulating since 2005 in southeast China.

In contrast, H5N1 samples from Phichit province in the lower North region were similar to the cluster of samples isolated during 2004 and 2005 outbreaks in Thailand and Vietnam, said Prof Dr Yong Poovorawan, author of the Chulalongkorn University study.

The viruses isolated from Phichit belonged to genotype Z, whereas the virus isolated from Nakhon Phanom belonged to genotype V, he wrote in his report.

The latest bird-flu outbreak, in the Northeast province of Mukdahan, has raised concerns that the genotype V virus from the Northeast could spread to meet with the genotype Z virus endemic in the lower North and Central region, said veterinarian Rakthai Ngampak, head of the Department of Livestock Development's Bird Flu Control Centre.

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