Bird Flu: A Virus of Our Own Hatching

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The spread throughout Asia seems to have followed the same pattern. Some officials alleged that backyard flocks were at higher risk than those housed in enclosed industrial facilities. But when public health researchers from Johns Hopkins University looked into the matter, they found just the opposite. Publishing their findings in a December 2006 Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations report, they found that industrial-scale chicken and egg operations in Thailand were proportionally four times more likely to suffer H5N1 outbreaks than small flocks kept outdoors. Never once has such a virus been known to emerge in a pasture-raised chicken flock — the only scientific study to date on the subject has revealed that industrial facilities are at the highest risk for spreading this virus as well.

The Culprit: Industrial Ag

The globalization of this Westernized industrial model of poultry production has not only facilitated the spread of deadly viruses like H5N1, but also plays a role in their emergence in the first place. After all, people have been raising birds in their back yards for thousands of years and birds have been migrating for millions. Only in recent years have we seen an exponential increase in the number of outbreaks of highly pathogenic (disease-causing) strains of bird flu. As leading flu scientist Ilaria Capua remarked, “We’ve gone from a few snowflakes to an avalanche.”

The world’s foremost expert on bird flu, Robert Webster, director of the U.S. Collaborating Center of the World Health Organization, was asked by the senior correspondent of the TV show “NewsHour with Jim Lehrer” to identify the “change in conditions that suddenly lit a match to the tinder” — in other words, what started the avalanche. Dr. Webster replied:

“Farming practices have changed. Previously, we had backyard poultry. I grew up on a farm in New Zealand. We had a few backyard chickens and ducks. The next door neighbor was so far away it didn’t matter. Now we put millions of chickens into a chicken factory next door to a pig factory, and this virus has the opportunity to get into one of these chicken factories and make billions and billions of these mutations continuously. And so what we’ve changed is the way we raise animals.”

Dozens of heritage poultry breeds used to peck around America’s barnyards. Now chickens raised for meat have been bred to be nearly genetically identical, and are typically warehoused in massive sheds containing tens of thousands of birds standing in their own waste. This global monoculture of tens of billions of birds bred for rapid weight gain creates conditions ripe for viral survival, mutation and dispersal. U. S. Department of Agriculture researchers conclude: “Selection of poultry for fast growth rate is often accompanied by a reduction in specific immune responses or increased disease susceptibility.”

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