CANADA: Bird Flu Defeated - At High Cost

CANADA: Bird Flu Defeated - At High Cost
By Stephen Leahy

BROOKLIN, Canada, Aug 27 (IPS) - While the World Health Organisation (WHO) said Wednesday that more money and attention is needed to contain bird flu in Asia, Canada's recent outbreak was successfully contained in less than five months but at an enormous, and many say unnecessary, cost.

The avian flu that struck the Province of British Columbia's Fraser Valley last February was identified as H7N3, a milder and less infectious sub-type than the H5N1 that has killed at least 27 people in Asia this year. Only two Canadian poultry workers became ill and both have since recovered. The area was declared disease-free and all restrictions were rescinded Aug. 18.

But the costs to control the outbreak were substantial and include 17 million culled chickens, turkeys and ducks, thousands of lost jobs and an estimated 400-million-dollar (305.6 million U.S. dollars) impact on the local economy.

Critics say the vast majority of culled birds were uninfected and that the Canadian government overreacted in a desperate effort to protect its multi-billion-dollar food export sector. In 2003, the country's beef exports plummeted nearly two billion dollars because one Canadian cow was discovered to be infected with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) or mad cow disease.

These disease outbreaks are a direct result of intensive "factory" farming practices that treat animals like machines, says Cathy Holtslander of Beyond Factory Farming Coalition, a Canadian non-governmental organisation (NGO).

Packing 25,000 to 50,000 chickens into a barn, a common practice in big poultry operations in Canada, the United States and elsewhere, creates ideal conditions for breeding viruses, adds Debra Probert, executive director of the Vancouver Humane Society. "We're taking a big risk with our own health raising animals under those conditions."

Asia's bird flu continues to worry health officials even though it only occasionally infects people and is unable to spread from one person to another. The H5N1 virus has already mutated since the first outbreak in 1997 and is now resistant to flu vaccines and capable of getting through human immune defence systems.

If the strain became more infectious it would create a far worse global health problem then SARS, according to WHO officials. SARS killed about 800 people globally in 2002 and 2003.

Carolyn Inch, a veterinarian and national manager of disease control at the government's Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA), agrees that the large numbers of chickens raised in such close proximity in modern poultry barns creates ideal conditions for viruses to mutate and potentially become dangerous.

"Just passing the virus to 3,000 or 4,000 chickens is enough to change a harmless virus into something more pathogenic" Inch told IPS.

However, Canada's poultry production and marketing system cannot be compared to those in Asia, she said. Live bird markets on that continent brings animals from different areas together with huge numbers of people, making it easy for the virus to move not only from bird to bird and back to the farm but also from bird to human.

"It's a valid concern that the bird flu could become the next global pandemic," Inch said.

While this was Canada's first experience with bird flu, the neighbouring United States experienced several outbreaks this year alone. Just months ago several hundred thousand chickens were culled in the eastern states of Maryland, Delaware and Pennsylvania following the detection of the H7N2 type.

More worryingly, the state of Texas had a small outbreak of the much more dangerous H5N2 type in February. U.S. officials declared the virus eradicated Aug. 25, following six months without further outbreaks.

It is not known how the first poultry operation in BC became infected. Low levels of avian flu are normally found in flocks of wild ducks and other wild birds, Inch said. It does not affect those birds but the virus can be present in their faeces and survives well in water.

The Fraser Valley, which lies 70 km inland from west coast Vancouver, is home to 14 percent of Canada's entire flock - more than 20 million chickens - on some 600 large and small operations.

While the source of the disease remains unknown, the rapid spread from the first farm to many others was likely the result of sharing equipment and staff, Inch said.

In particular, crews of "chicken-catchers" travelling barn to barn to load the animals onto trucks for transport to slaughter likely spread the disease, she added.

It took less than six weeks for the flu to move from the first farm to 18 others. Soon after, CFIA officials determined that drastic action was needed. "The only way to contain the spread was to create a firewall around the rest of Canada," according to Inch.

Virtually all domestic birds within the entire Fraser Valley - even those that were several kilometres away from infected flocks - were killed on site by government officials. Emus, ostriches, parrots and other pet birds were also killed.

Police were sometimes required to enforce the mandatory cull and protect officials when farmers and other breeders attempted to prevent the killings. The carcasses of some 15.7 million birds that subsequently proved free of infection were sent for processing and were sold for human consumption.

It cost the Canadian government an estimated five million dollars to battle the disease, including bills for charter flights to dispatch samples to a testing laboratory 2,000 km away, in Winnipeg.

Compensation payments to farmers total 56 million dollars so far but the breeders are looking for far more to cover losses they say total 340 million dollars.

Small operators, especially those raising organic and rare breed varieties want more than money. They've asked for a public inquiry into how the cull was conducted, the Humane Society's Probert said in an interview. "They lost invaluable genetics when their flocks were culled despite being disease free."

The irony is that those birds are much healthier and would likely have resisted the disease, she said. By contrast, chickens raised in intensive operations in all of North America come from just four or five breeders. Not only similar genetically, they have been bred to grow extremely fast and have poor immune systems, according to Probert.

Beyond Farming's Holtslander is also upset that some CFIA officials suggested "backyard" breeders might have been responsible for the outbreak. "The government only acted on behalf of the big food exporting corporations under the guise of protecting public health," she said.

Disease outbreaks like this are a result of our unsustainable and dangerous food production system, added Holtslander. "We've been lucky so far that it hasn't been worse." (END/2004)

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