<
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/oct/18/factory-farms-of-disease-how-industrial-chicken-production-is-breeding-the-next-pandemic>
"One day last December, 101,000 chickens at a gigantic farm near the city of
Astrakhan in southern Russia started to collapse and die. Tests by the state
research centre showed that a relatively new strain of lethal avian flu known
as H5N8 was circulating, and within days 900,000 birds at the Vladimirskaya
plant were hurriedly slaughtered to prevent an epidemic.
Avian flu is the world’s other ongoing pandemic and H5N8 is just one strain
that has torn through thousands of chicken, duck and turkey flocks across
nearly 50 countries including Britain in recent years and shows no sign of
stopping.
But the Astrakhan incident was different. When 150 workers at the farm were
tested, five women and two men were found to have the disease, albeit mildly.
It was the first time that H5N8 had been known to jump from birds to humans.
The World Health Organization (WHO) was alerted but, this being at the height
of the Covid-19 pandemic, little attention was paid even when Anna Popova,
chief consumer adviser to the Russian Federation, went on TV to warn “with a
degree of probability” that human-to-human transmission of H5N8 would evolve
soon and that work should start immediately on developing a vaccine.
Global attention is fixed on the origins of Covid-19, either in nature or from
a laboratory, but eight or more variants of avian flu, all of which are able to
infect and kill humans and are potentially more severe than Covid-19, now
regularly rattle around the world’s factory farms barely noticed by
governments."
Via Diane A.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
