Development & Aid, Europe, Global, Global Geopolitics, Headlines, Health

HEALTH: Europeans Chicken Out

Miren Gutierrez

ROME, Mar 2 2006 (IPS) - “Fifty percent discount!” screams a poster on top of a pile of unwanted roasted chickens. And there are more discounts around on chicken. Despite official guarantees that eating chicken is harmless, poultry sales have plummeted 70 percent in Italy.

The Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI) H5N1 strain has been detected already in poultry in Italy, Austria, Bulgaria, France, Greece, Germany, Hungary, and Croatia. Alarm is spreading with the virus in Europe.

News bulletins are full of calls for calm: yes, the virus can be lethal to humans; no, it still does not represent a serious risk here; no, your canary does not pose any danger either; consuming properly cooked poultry is not dangerous; and, in any case, to catch the disease from a chicken a person must come into contact with the secretions or excretions of an infected bird. Politicians are shown on television heroically eating chicken.

But Jan Slingenbergh, senior officer at the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) Animal Health Service told IPS in an interview that “what we have ahead could cause many more problems.”

So far in Europe the virus has been detected in a bunch of dead swans in diverse places, in limited numbers of chickens and turkeys in France and Austria, and lately in a cat on the German island Ruegen.

Some reports have linked the bird flu in Europe to infected swans fleeing a Balkans cold surge.

Slingenbergh says he is not certain that this is the case. “The swans don’t fly very far, they can fly no more 100 km a day. (At that pace) it takes a long time to move from the Balkans to Western Europe…we are not sure whether it was swans that brought the virus; it could have been other birds.”

But while Europeans panic about the dead swans, other dangers are brewing elsewhere.

“Now we are getting the virus popping up in Sweden due to the routine spring migrations of birds that is starting,” Slingenbergh says. “This could bring a lot of virus flare-ups, particularly in higher altitude Northern Europe, from Scandinavia all the way to Siberia. That is where millions of birds move in their spring migrations in preparation for the summer breading…we don’t know how many birds are affected; but the circumstances tell us this is not business as usual.”

Migrating birds could bring the disease back into Europe after wintering in Nigeria, where an outbreak was confirmed in Kaduna and Kano.

“We are in the dark about what brought the virus to Nigeria,” said Slingenbergh. “Two million Garganey ducks arrive in Nigeria from Europe in the autumn. The problem for Europe is when they come back.” Slingenbergh does not rule out trade as a route of contagion.

Nigerian authorities have reported the death of 150,000 birds in Kano and Kaduna states, and more outbreaks have been registered in other parts of the country, according to a report by the New Scientist. While the Nigerian government is trying to fight the virus, the challenge is to convince ordinary Nigerians about the urgent need to cull birds, stop poultry trade and transportation, and to sanitise farms.

“The situation in Nigeria is worrisome because of their difficulties in fighting the problem. But how this will affect Europe, we don’t really know. Besides, we don’t quite understand how fast the disease will spread in Africa. They have problems in infrastructure, but they are not as crowded as Asia, so the virus may not travel as fast as at the beginning of the epidemic in Asia,” adds Slingenbergh.

“The risk (of infection) seems to be proportional to the amount of exposure of humans to chicken virus in areas where there are active outbreaks,” he says. “So eventually we’ll have human cases as well in Africa, like before in China and Vietnam. Turkey has been sitting on the disease for months, so now we have human cases (of infection).”

The virus was spotted in domestic poultry for the first time in Southeast Asia in 2003; but until 2005, the outbreaks were restricted to Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and China. H5N1 has claimed at least 91 lives in Asia.

BirdLife International, a conservation group, says there are three probable transmission routes for H5N1, the so-called Asian strain: trade in wild birds; trade of poultry and poultry products; and the use of infected poultry manure as fertiliser. Bird conservationists add that although migratory birds can carry and transmit the virus, they are usually less prone to infection than domestic poultry, often kept in farms, where intensive rearing and overcrowded conditions allow the virus to evolve to a highly pathogenic form.

“The ornithologists like to put the blame on poultry and not on wild birds,” says Slingenbergh. “But the truth is that the both work together in the expansion of the virus. Wild birds travel long distances and help transfer the virus, but you need poultry to amplify the effect.”

“The evidence is now overwhelming that migrating birds can move H5N1 over long distances,” says co-author Malik Peiris in a research paper published Feb. 10 by the U.S.- based Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). “But they are not the scapegoats for maintaining H5N1 within poultry. They are the cause, and the solution lies within the poultry industry.”

The paper says that “most transmission is via local poultry movements” rather than by migrating birds.

Importation of poultry from contaminated countries is banned. But in spite of this “it is also a factor of significance,” says Slingenbergh.

“We know that it was important in the major outbreak of 2003 in the Netherlands,” he says. “The disease was spread by lorries transporting domestic poultry; it was very ‘poultry related’. We also know that poultry dissemination played a role in the spread of the disease from China to Vietnam.”

Whatever the entry point, the real danger is that a strain of the virus will transmute into a version that can be passed from person to person. Although that has not happened yet, it is a scary thought in Europe and elsewhere.