Scott McPherson's Web Presence

I just read something that sent chills up and down my spine.  A flash report from Homeland Security NTARC News, intercepted and forwarded by Google Alerts, speaks volumes about what might happen in the snap of a finger or the blink of an eye.

While we can certainly attribute many of these reports to some sort of group hysteria, or seasonal flu, or mass suggestion, or "D - All of the Above," we can also hope with all our hearts that our worst fears are not realized.

Bird Flu Fears In India - 2000 Complain Of Fever - Government Says Not To Worry

If this is your first time visiting National Terror Alert you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed. The National terror Alert feed features breaking news, alerts and bulletins on demand and it's free of charge..
You will only see this message on your first visit to the site. Thanks for visiting!

About 2,324 cases of people suffering from fever have been reported from the Birbhum district Ground Zero of the bird flu outbreak in the state  in the last five days.  “The West Bengal Government is failing to understand the gravity of the situation,” said Union Minister of State for Health and Family Welfare P Lakshmi, during a visit to Birbhum on Tuesday.

Lakshmi, who is currently in the state to get a first hand assessment of the culling operations, did not find adequate health infrastructure to combat the bird flu threat. She criticised the state government for acting irresponsibly and lacking seriousness to fight the disease.

“There is no infrastructure, not even qualified doctors. We have sent pills and gear but the required equipment is not in place till date. They do not understand that this is an emergency situation and they should be prepared for it,” she added.

She blamed the state Animal Resource Development department for the spread of the virus to new areas, as it did not carry out culling operations in a swift manner.

The state government, however, maintained that there has been no case of H5N1 virus infecting humans, and tried to play down its own figures of fever cases in Birbhum.

“There is no need to panic. We do not have any reports of humans being infected. Therefore, a few hundred fever cases means nothing,” said Sanchita Bakshi, state director health services.

According to the status report, as many as 707 fever cases were reported from Birbhum district on January 18.

A day later and another 304 people were added to the list.

For January 20, which happened to be a Sunday, the report does not give any figures.

On January 21, 707 more cases were added to the existing figures and today an additional 613 cases of fever were recorded.

The report further stated that that six central rapid response teams are assisting the state government in culling operations.

Five human blood samples taken from South Dinajpur district have tested negative, the report added.

An article that appeared a few weeks ago in the Salt Lake City, Utah Tribune underscores the need to remain vigilant regarding migratory wildfowl -- and the diseases they carry.  It is also a shot across the bow of those who think migrating birds have gotten an unfair rap when it comes to carrying disease long distances.  It does, however, validate the claim that wild birds can be as much a victim as a carrier, especially where this disease is concerned (read on).

Avian cholera killing water fowl at Great Salt Lake

Avian cholera is killing eared grebes, ducks and gulls on the Great Salt Lake in what is becoming an all-too-regular event on the important migratory bird flyway.

Prevailing northwesterly winds have blown about 1,500 bird carcasses into windrows along a half-mile stretch of the lake's southern shoreline near Saltair, Tom Aldrich, migratory game bird expert for the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources, said Wednesday.

While the disease doesn't affect humans, people shouldn't pick up the birds or let their dogs chew on them, he said.      Avian cholera has been confirmed in the eared grebes. Gull and duck carcasses have been sent to the U.S. Geological Survey National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wis., for analysis.  "If I was a betting man, I would bet it was cholera," Aldrich said.

Introduced from domestic fowl during the 1940s, avian cholera has become the most common infectious disease among wild North American waterfowl but didn't appear in Utah until the late 1990s. In 2004, avian cholera killed about 30,000 eared grebes on the Great Salt Lake.

http://www.sltrib.com/outdoors/ci_7871181

The disease is not limited to Utah birds, however.  A more recent article in the Stockton, California Record also laments the appearance of avian cholera.

Birds diagnosed with avian cholera

http://www.recordnet.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080112/A_NEWS/80111014

And still another article, this time from the Eureka, California Times-Standard:

Waterfowl hit hard by cholera

 Thousands of waterfowl have succumbed to disease over the past month in one of the worst outbreaks of avian cholera on the North Coast in more than 60 years.

The lessons of avian cholera can be easily carried over to avian flu.  Imagine if domestic fowl were somehow infected with H5N1.  The disease is then carried over to wild birds, instead of vice versa.  The migratory birds then move, and transmit the virus to other domestic fowl.  This pattern repeats itself over and over again until we have our own "Clade" of avian H5N1. 

The chapter is: http://www.nwhc.usgs.gov/publications/field_manual/chapter_7.pdf

Now, I want to awaken those who think that there is no such thing as backyard poultry in America.  HAHAHAHAHHAAAAAAAAAA!  Are you WRONG!  First, I will tell you about one of my nephews, who lives on an island off the coast of Washington State.  He is a farmer.  He has also raised a rooster to be his pet.  He (the rooster) comes into the home during the day and returns to his coop in the evening.  Kind of like a Peabody Hotel without the $175 a night rooms and chicken instead of duck.

Anyway, I have told his father that his son is MAD.  I have pointed out the location of the island -- in the thickest part of the Pacific Flyway.  Oh well, all you can do is all you can do.  But how about this AP article from December, 2007, that was picked up by MSNBC, ABC News and other sources:

Pet chickens may be plucked from owners

CHICAGO - Chicago's City Council is poised to send a message to residents: We don't want your clucking chickens.

Coming up for a vote Wednesday is a proposal to ban chickens, a former barnyard denizen that is pecking its way into cities across the country as part of a growing organic food trend among young professionals and other urban dwellers.

Chicken lovers say the birds make great pets, do not take up much backyard space and provide tasty, nutritious eggs.

Cities including Madison, Wisconsin, and Kent, Washington, have passed ordinances allowing people to keep chickens. In Ann Arbor, Michigan, a councilman says he plans to introduce a resolution to allow hens to be kept for eggs, and the Board of Zoning Appeals in the upscale Indianapolis suburb of Carmel recently approved an exception to city rules to allow a family to keep three hens in their backyard.

But the Chicago alderman who proposed a Chicago ban say chicken lovers forget that the birds attract rodents.

"This past summer I started hearing that residents were letting chickens out of their yard and they were leaving poop and mice were feeding off of it," said Alderman Lona Lane. "Then we started getting rodent-control problems and, sure enough, it was the chickens."

There are also concerns about parasites the birds might carry, and the possibility that they could transmit bird flu if it makes its way to the U.S., said Dr. Marek Digas, the supervising veterinarian at the city's Commission on Animal Care and Control.

"It is something we should consider," he said.

Rooster racket
Many neighbors of chicken-keepers are not happy, either. This year, the city received more than 700 complaints about chickens — though mostly about the racket from roosters.

"We don't encourage people to keep roosters because of the noise," said Johannes Paul, one of the founders of Omlet, a British company that sells a dome-shaped chicken house called the eglu in the U.S for $495.

"The chickens will produce eggs more than happily without a rooster around," Paul said.

Chicagoan Kim Jackson said her two chickens, Papoo and Chalmers, do a little quiet talking but that's it.

She says they do not smell, largely because she and her husband regularly clean up after them. But even if they did not, "it's not nearly as bad as a dog as far as how far-reaching the smell will get," she said.

Fresher eggs
Although there are no firm statistics on the number of city chickens, they are becoming so popular that Backyard Poultry magazine was relaunched a couple of years ago after halting publication in the 1980s. And Paul said U.S. sales of his company's designer chicken coops have doubled every year since they were introduced here in 2005.

Those who have eaten eggs from their own chickens say they are far fresher and tastier than store-bought eggs.

"And they're so productive for the garden," said Owen Taylor, training and livestock coordinator of Just Food, a New York-based nonprofit group. "They aerate the soil, eat bugs and they look like little tractors, tilling the soil."

Taylor said he was surprised that Chicago — a city that banned foie gras in restaurants over concerns about cruelty to geese and embraced rooftop gardening — is not more welcoming of chickens.

"The mayor has bees on the roof of City Hall so I was thinking Chicago was ahead of its time in terms of livestock regulations," said Taylor.

Some say the experience of chicken-keepers in other cities proves Chicago's proposed ordinance is unnecessary.

"You hear the same argument (that) they're loud, they smell ... that there would be wild chickens running amok in Seattle, but that hasn't been the case,' said Angelina Shell, of Seattle Tilth, a nonprofit organic gardening and urban ecology group.

What may doom them in Chicago, say chicken supporters, is that for all the talk about noise, smell and disease, chickens simply do not look like they belong in today's modern city.

"It's a gentrification issue," said Erika Allen of Growing Power, a nonprofit group that promotes urban gardening around the country. "People move in and they don't want chickens next to their house so they go and complain."

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22215439/  (bold all mine)

Chicagoans, obviously tired of seeing their beloved Cubs choke year in and year out, have decided to adopt chickens and put them in their backyards.  So what makes Chicago, or Ann Arbor, or Madison, any different than Kolkata, Tangerang or rural Britain?  Only the absence of high-path H5N1  -- for now.

I have not posted anything on the worsening situation in India because, quite frankly, the scope of it is so huge that it took me days to come to terms with it.

Specifically, the area is West Bengal, a state located along the nation’s border with Bangladesh. It is some 33,000 square miles, just larger in area than South Carolina. When you combine affected areas of adjacent Bangladesh, the region is about the same size and shape as Maine. It has the third-best economy in India, and is home to more than 80,000,000 people, or roughly 8% of the nation’s population. Its capital is Kolkata, or what we used to call Calcutta.

So what is going on in West Bengal? Chaos. Tens of thousands of chickens have literally dropped dead in the past month. Thousands of dead, diseased fowl litter the streets of rural villages in West Bengal. It is the worst outbreak of H5N1 in India’s history, a fact confirmed by the WHO. And it is centered around backyard poultry as well as larger farms. Across the border in Bangladesh, similar events are occurring.

The Indian government has taken the task seriously, using the words ‘war footing” and calling up literally thousands of veterinarians to help supervise the culling of what will certainly wind up being nearly two million chickens. The Indian equivalent of the National Guard has been called up to help stop the smuggling of poultry into and out of the West Bengal area. And the Indian government has made the decision to try and cull migratory wildfowl as well as chickens.

But farmers and villagers alike are resisting the government’s efforts to combat the virus. In acts of insane defiance, many are cooking and eating poultry they strongly suspect is diseased. They are hiding birds from the authorities, and are demanding immediate compensation for the birds being culled. In some cases, they are attacking the cullers as they approach.

They are also furious at what they perceive to be an initial lackluster response from the West Bengal government. Rumors abound that chickens had been dying for weeks prior to the discovery of H5N1.

Naturally, the sudden loss of so many birds has caused shockwaves through the Indian markets, both poultry and stock. For a nation that as a general rule does not eat beef, this is putting one of the two main protein sources (the other is mutton) for over one billion people in serious jeopardy. Contrary to popular belief, only 31% of Indians are vegetarians, according to a 2006 survey performed by the Hindu newspaper and CNN-IBN. While some 55% of Brahmins are vegetarians, most Hindus are non-vegetarians. This means that the loss of two million chickens will create a tough situation for those rural villagers who rely upon chickens for sustenance.  http://www.hinduonnet.com/2006/08/14/stories/2006081403771200.htm

Because of a shortage of supplies, these culls are taking gruesome form. Birds’ necks are being broken to kill them, and workers may or may not have protective equipment.

So it was not surprising that we would soon start hearing reports of people being hospitalized with bird flu symptoms. These reports are, at least for now, confined to cullers and children. Thousands of courses of Tamiflu have been sent into the West Bengal state for precautionary purposes, according to Indian media reports.

Shockwaves are also being felt in the wildlife community. Media reports of dead and dying crows, hawks, owls, vultures, dogs, pigs and other animals are unsettling to say the least. And the images of the dying tigers at the Bangkok Zoo a few years ago (you recall with horror as over forty tigers died from eating H5N1-contaminated meat) could be rekindled if diseased birds are eaten by those magnificent Bengal tigers.

Coincidentally, HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt was recently in India, looking at vaccine and health care facilities and factories that produce goods for the US market. Talk about being in the right place at the right time! (thanks to treyfish for that tidbit).

Now the BBC has reporters at Ground Zero of the outbreak.

West Bengal battles with bird flu

By Rahul Tandon
BBC News, Margram

Margram is a large village in West Bengal - it is also the epicentre of the bird flu outbreak.

As I walk into the village, I can see a group of young children playing in the fields. Next to them are dead chickens. Some of the children are picking up the dead bird's feathers to sell. They have no idea of the dangers of touching infected birds.

Next to them, sat outside his hut, is an old man. Anwar Hoque has his head in his hands. As I walk past he starts shouting: "We have no help from the government - we want medicines but they are not providing us with them and we have cannot afford to buy them from the shops."

There is no sign of the flu anti-viral Tamiflu here.

Slow progress

What strikes me about this rural village is the lack of government officials.

Many of the 60,000 people who live here keep chickens - indeed some estimate that there were 150,000 chickens in this village before the outbreak of bird flu. For many, poultry farming is their only source of income. Yet very few know anything about avian flu - and there seem to be few officials on hand to provide these villagers with information.

After walking around the village for 15 minutes I finally see a team of men in protective white suits. They are part of the culling team. The state government here in West Bengal has ordered the culling of 400,000 birds.

But progress is very slow. The man leading this team is Dr Ramchandratta. He tells me this morning they have only killed five birds.

He is angry with the villagers and says: "They are not interested in handing over their birds and that is making life very hard for us." In front of me, one of his team has a young chick in his hand and is surrounded by a group of children.

He kills it by breaking its neck.

'Chaotic'

As I walk away Dr Ramchandratta asks me to come back. He tells me he is a "soldier of the government" and he is trying his best but people are not listening to him. There are stories here of some villagers smuggling birds out to other areas and even of some culling teams being attacked.

It is a chaotic scene. Just outside the village is a large yellow building. It is from here that Kakoli Mukherjee is directing operations to tackle the problem. Sitting at her desk, she is surrounded by villagers.

She accepts that there are problems, but says: "none of us have any experience of dealing with this disease". Avian flu is spreading across West Bengal.

As I drive out of Margram it is clear that unless the villagers and the local government start working together this problem can only get worse.

The article can be read at this link:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7198985.stm

A Google map from Dr. Henry Niman shows the locations of confirmed and suspected poultry H5N1:

LE TELEGRAM

TO: MONSIEUR BERNARD VALLAT

FROM: OIE BOARD OF DIRECTORS

SUBJECT: YOUR COMMENTS RE H5N1

MONSIEUR VALLAT STOP OUTBREAK OF H5N1 GROWING TO ALARMING DIMENSIONS IN BANGLADESH STOP ALSO SITUATION IN INDIA WORSENING BY THE HOUR STOP FARMERS NOT HEEDING CALL TO CULL BIRDS BECAUSE YOU SAID SITUATION OVERBLOWN STOP OUR OWN FRENCH GOVERNMENT RAISED BIRD FLU ALARM LEVEL BECAUSE OF OUTBREAK OF H5N1 IN SWANS JUST ACROSS CHANNEL FROM US STOP YOUR CLARIFICATION DID NOTHING TO DISCOURAGE NAYSAYERS LIKE JOHN BIRCH SOCIETY FROM QUOTING YOU STOP SINCE WHEN DID JOHN BIRCHERS BECOME EXPERTS IN MICROBIOLOGY ANYWAY STOP WE JUST CONFIRMED OUTBREAK OF H5N1 IN IRANIAN POULTRY STOP ALSO CONFIRMED OUTBREAK OF H5N1 IN UKRAINE STOP W.H.O. NOW SAYS TEN CLADES OF H5N1 NOW EXIST SIMULTANEOUSLY AROUND THE WORLD WHICH INVALIDATES YOUR CLAIM THAT H5N1 IS EXTREMELY STABLE STOP SO WOULD YOU PLEASE STOP TALKING ABOUT H5N1 STOP STOP STOP STOP

You may recall that in December, 2006, an article appeared in MSBNC.com.

Govt. is looking in wrong place for bird flu Birds from Latin America most likely to bring virus to U.S., study says

WASHINGTON - Birds from Latin America — not from the north — are most likely to bring deadly bird flu to the main U.S., researchers said Monday, suggesting the government might miss the H5N1 virus because biologists have been looking in the wrong direction.

The United States’ $29 million bird flu surveillance program has focused heavily on migratory birds flying from Asia to Alaska, where researchers this year collected tens of thousands of samples from wild birds nesting on frozen tundra before making their way south.

Those birds present a much lower risk than migratory birds that make their way north from South America through Central America and Mexico, where controls on imported poultry are not as tough as in the U.S. and Canada, according to findings in the latest Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Nations south of the U.S. import hundreds of thousands of chickens a year from countries where bird flu has turned up in migratory birds or poultry, said A. Marm Kilpatrick, lead author of the study.

Poultry trade riskier than migratory birds
“The risk is actually higher from the poultry trade to the Americas than from migratory birds,” said Kilpatrick, of the Consortium for Conservation Medicine in New York. Other researchers on the study came from the Smithsonian Institution.

If bird flu arrives in Mexico or somewhere farther south, it could be a matter of time before a migratory bird carries the virus to the United States, Kilpatrick said.

“It’s not just a matter of worrying about who you trade with, but it’s a matter of thinking about who do your neighbors trade with, and who do your trading partners trade with,” Kilpatrick said. “We need to be looking both south and north.”

The study concluded that “current American surveillance plans that focus primarily on the Alaskan migratory bird pathway may fail to detect the introduction of H5N1 into the United States in time to prevent its spread into domestic poultry.”

The report is the first to combine the DNA fingerprint of the H5N1 virus in different countries with data on the movement of migratory birds and commercial poultry in those countries.

The analysis helped to determine, for example, that the outbreak of bird flu in Turkey likely didn’t come from poultry imports from Thailand, as previously thought. Instead, the probable source was migratory birds in Russia, where the virus had similar DNA to the virus in Turkey.

The study found that:

• Bird flu was spread through Asia by the poultry trade.
• Most of the spread throughout Europe was from migratory birds.
• Bird flu spread into Africa from migratory birds as well as poultry trade.

U.S. officials cautioned that the study is not the final authority on the spread and prevention of bird flu.

'A big puzzle'
“When you look at scientific literature, it’s a big puzzle. This puts in a few more pieces,” said David Swayne, director of the Agriculture Department’s Southeast Poultry Research Laboratory in Athens, Ga.

Swayne cautioned that researchers looked only at countries’ import restrictions through 2005.

“I’m not saying it’s the fault of the study; the study is designed to look at what happened in the past,” Swayne said. “We have to be very careful not to over-interpret. There is a limit on how recent the data is.”

In addition, Agriculture Department officials said they are not focusing exclusively on Alaska.

More resources have been spent in Alaska than in other states so far, but testing is happening throughout the lower 48, and the U.S. is even helping Mexico do surveillance, said Tom DeLiberto, the department’s National Wildlife Disease Coordinator.

“We have more information now than we did when we designed the surveillance effort last fall,” DeLiberto said.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16043274

When that article ran, I called my sources at the University of Florida (Go Gators! Go Tebow!). UF has an ongoing program designed to map the migratory routes of wild birds throughout South America, but the program has met with little overall success. The reasons? Among other things, that region is a hotbed of geopolitical instability. Unlike in North America and Europe, many South American and Central American nations palpably don't like each other very much. Drug cartels, Maoist guerrillas, and despots abound. Their level of distrust is heightened by the shenanigans of such wretched types as Venezuela's tyrant-in-training, Hugo Chavez, and his clear efforts at destabilizing the region. For those who take issue: Newsweek's expose regarding how Chavez and his "reform" proposals got their asses kicked in the recent elections and the Venezuelan military's declaration that if Chavez tried to overturn the election results (he tried, oh how he tried to overturn them) would prompt a coup de tat, they sat down and "negotiated" a face-saving 51% to 49% defeat. What a cur.

But I digress. Fact of the matter is, there are pitifully few well-mapped migratory wildfowl routes in the Americas south of Mexico. This seriously hampers efforts at surveillance, because if you don't know where the birds migrate to and from, you don't know what you don't know.

Over two-thirds of all the landbirds that breed in temperate North America, for example, migrate long distances to nonbreeding areas in Mexico, Central and South America and the islands of the Caribbean (Keast and Morton 1980, Rappole 1995).

That's it??!!

Not quite. Another reference, from the University of Florida paper titled " The potential for applying current research techniques on migratory bird biology in South America" http://www.zoo.ufl.edu/ajahn/applying%20tech1.htm , states:

Ironically, very little information exists on the migratory strategies of virtually any of the migratory bird species on the continent that is home to the world’s richest avifauna, South America. This condition exists in spite of the fact that austral migration, in which migration occurs between temperate and tropical South America, is one of the major avian migratory systems in the world and the largest in the Southern Hemisphere (Chesser 1994). With unique habitats, topographies and rapidly growing environmental alteration by humans, potential threats unique to South American migrants which depend on a range of resources across wide ranges throughout the year, may be significant.

Okay, let's review. We know we currently have low-path bird flu (H5N2) in the Dominican republic. We also know that there is a lax approach taken to poultry management and poultry health in Mexico, and other places in the Americas. We also know there is a real lack of hard data on where migratory birds go when they venture South of the Equator. We also know that things have a way of coming up from Down There, namely killer bees, dengue fever (see my latest post on dengue), and other maladies also venture up from the Americas all the time. Here's the latest: Suddenly, yellow fever is back on the list of things Brazilians are worrying about (see “Millions in Brazil seek shots in yellow fever scare” http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSN15407443  with a hat-tip to Slawdog..

These lessons, apparently, have not been lost on the US government, which for some strange reason seems to be actually reading these articles and acting upon them! From last week:

Bird flu: US/Chile coordinate detection in Tierra del

Fuego