U.N. Food & Agricultural Organization includes animal welfare considerations in plan to “stamp out” deadly avian flu

April 1, 2004 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, April 2004:

GENEVA–The United Nations Food and
Agricultural Organization, not known for
pro-animal stances, on March 18 recommended as
part of the FAO “Control Strategies for Highly
Pathogenic Avian Influenza (H5N1) in Asia” that
involved nations should “Provide humane
euthanasia methods for all animals to be
euthanized.”
The recommendation was included as the
sixth of nine points emphasized under the subhead
“Stamping-out policy for infected poultry
(including Valuation, Disposal, Cleaning and
Disinfection, Biosecurity and Animal Welfare).”
The inclusion of an expressed concern for
animal welfare, while not unprecedented, hints
at an FAO response to the view expressed earlier
by World Health Organiz-ation spokesperson Peter
Cordingly that, “It might be time, although
this is none of WHO’s business, that humans have
to think about how they treat animals and how
they farm them, how they market them–basically
the whole relationship between the animal kingdom
and the human kingdom.”
WHO and the FAO are parallel entities
established under U.N. auspices, and often work
together in combating epidemics.

H5N1 kills Thai zoo leopard; Beijing Zoo stops feeding live chickens to tigers

March 1, 2004 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2004:

BEIJING–The avian flu H5N1 killed an endangered clouded
leopard on January 27 at the Khao Khiew Zoo in Chonburi province,
Thailand, environment minister Prabat Panyachatraksa confirmed on
February 13, after two weeks of rumors. The leopard was fed mainly
chicken carcasses. A white tiger also became ill, but recovered.
The Khao Khiew Zoo and four other leading Thai zoos closed
their bird exhibits several days earlier, after 36 pheasants, pea
fowl, and Siamese firebacks died at a rare bird menagerie in Suphan
Buri province.
Pin Lyvun, director of the Phnom Tamao zoo in Cambodia,
told the Melbourne Age that 56 wild birds had died there as of
February 15, and that the zoo had killed 400 parakeets after some of
them died mysteriously. The zoo thereafter closed its bird exhibits.
The death of the clouded leopard was soon followed by menu
changes at the Beijing Zoo–not well-appreciated by the first
observers. “Gone are the lions and tigers’ live chicken dinners,”
lamented the Malaysia Star on February 11, in translation from the
China Daily. The big cats were switched to a more natural diet of
raw beef and mutton, the Malaysia Star and China Daily reported.
Western zoo experts have for more than a decade urged Chinese
counterparts to stop feeding live animals to carnivores. Chinese
zoo directors, however, have seen live feeding as a gate
attraction, contrary to lessons learned by most U.S. and European
animal exhibitors generations ago, and have defended the practice by
insisting that live feedings keep predators mentally fit.

Asian H5N1 pandemic rages on–worst ever factory farm disaster

March 1, 2004 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2004:

BANGKOK, BEIJING, JAKARTA–United
Nations Food & Agricultural Organization chief
Jacques Diouf on February 25 opened an emergency
meeting in Bangkok of experts from 23 nations
with a warning that the H5N1 avian flu pandemic
sweeping Southeast Asia in recent months is not
yet under control. Diouf urgently appealed for
economic help from other parts of the world.
Fear that H5N1 could quickly mutate into a
virulent human form was heightened on February 19
when Thai scientists confirmed that the disease
had killed 14 of 15 housecats kept by one family
who had seen one of the cats scavenging a dead
chicken. All of the cats fell ill, but one
recovered.
Further investigation determined,
however, that H5N1 had apparently not mutated
before killing the cats. In the avian form,
H5N1 kills about 70% of the humans it attacks,
but it apparently does not cross easily into
humans, and attacks mainly children, who have
had less time to develop a spectrum of immunities
to flu viruses.

WHO still worries about SARS

March 1, 2004 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2004:

GUANGZHOU, Guangdong– H5N1 pushed Sudden Acute Respiratory
Syndrome out of the news, but China and the World Health
Organization remain concerned that it could resurge.
The fourth and last known SARS case from a mid-December 2003
outbreak in Guangzhou was a 40-year-old medical doctor and hospital
director named Liu, who fell ill on January 7. Pronounced recovered
on January 18, he was confirmed as a SARS case on January 24. Liu
was believed to have become infected through his work.
The first known victim of the outbreak was 32-year-old TV
producer Luo Jian, a self-described “environmentalist who is against
the slaughter of living creatures.” Luo Jian fell ill on December
16 with the coronavirus found in civets, but swore he had never
eaten or handled a civet. Despite media reports that Luo Jian might
have been infected by wild mice or rats, the source of his case
remains unknown.
The second victim was waitress Zheng Ling, 20, who worked
in a Guangzhou restaurant that served civet meat.
The third was a 35-year-old man, of whom little has been disclosed.
Recalling the 2002-2003 SARS outbreak, which also began with
sporadic cases in Guangdong, and killed 916 people worldwide,
officials ordered the killing of about 10,000 captive masked palm
civets, tanukis (” raccoon dogs”), and hog badgers.

Editorial: Factory farming toll rises in Asia

March 1, 2004 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2004:

“We are preparing to campaign against burying birds with
influenza alive,” Voice-4-Animals founder Changkil Park e-mailed
from Seoul, South Korea, as the winter avian flu pandemic peaked,
and frantic officials and poultry workers struggled to contain it by
killing all the birds believed to be at risk. “I hope animal people
will have some ideas for us about how animal advocates should view
the massive inhumane treatment of birds,” Changkil Park added,
seeming to speak for thousands whose feelings ranged from shock to
despair.
Finding any good in the often unspeakably cruel culling of
more than 100 million chickens and other birds is admittedly
difficult.
The World Bank has pledged to finance rebuilding the
Southeast Asian poultry industry, moreover, which will probably
mean even more intensive promotion of factory farm methods in the
very near future. If Southeast Asian egg producers adopt the routine
live maceration or burial of “spent” hens that has become standard in
U.S. agribusiness, described elsewhere in this edition, the World
Bank involvement may help to institutionalize some of the cruelty
that is now horrifying television news viewers throughout the world.

Ebola exposure risk

March 1, 2004 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2004:

FORT DETRICK, Maryland– A National Research Council fellow
doing postdoctoral virology research at the U.S. Army Research
Institute for Infectious Diseases accidentally grazed herself with a
needle on February 11 while injecting mice with a weakened strain of
Ebola virus. Quarantined for 30 days on February 12, at “Level
Four” biosecurity, she remained free of Ebola symptoms at least
through February 18, reported David Dishneau of the Baltimore Sun.
The researcher was trying to develop a vaccine for Ebola. Ebola
victims typically die after several days of high fever, diarrhea,
vomiting, and both internal and external bleeding.

How the U.S. kills sick & “spent” chickens

March 1, 2004 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2004:

SAN DIEGO–Calls to television stations
and letters to newspapers indicate that Americans
were mostly shocked by coverage of live burial
and sometimes live incineration of chickens in
Souteast Asia to stop the spread of avian flu
H5N1–but live burial of chickens is also common
here, to dispose of “spent” hens and surplus
male chicks from laying hen “factories.”
The U.S. egg industry kills about 170
million spent hens and as many as 235 million
male chicks per year. In 2002 about 111 million
spent hens were killed in U.S. and Canadian
slaughterhouses. Nearly 59 million hens, along
with the male chicks, were killed by other
means. That number is expected to increase by
about 21 million in 2004, warned Poultry Times
writer Barbara Olenik in September 2003.
“The USDA purchased approximately 30
million spent hens a year through their canned
boned and diced chicken purchase programs,
making it the largest market for spent hens,”
Olenick explained. “However, in July 2003 the
USDA announced new specifications that fowl
producers must meetŠdue to complaints of bone
fragments and injuries to consumers in the
National School Lunch Program.”

Did Plum Island lab introduce Lyme & West Nile viruses?

March 1, 2004 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2004:

ORIENT POINT, N.Y.–The 850-acre Plum Island Animal Disease
Center, just off Long Island, operated by the USDA and the
Department of Homeland Security, is nominally the first line of
defense for Americans against zoonotic diseases associated with
agriculture–like the avian flu H5N1.
Now New York City corporate attorney Michael C. Carroll, 31,
argues in a newly published book entitled Lab 257 – The Disturbing
Story of the Government’s Secret Plum Island Germ Laboratory, from
William Morrow Inc., that accidents at Plum Island may have
introduced Lyme disease and West Nile fever to the U.S.
“The first outbreak of Lyme disease occurred in Old Lyme,
Connecticut, in 1975,” Carroll pointed out to Newsday staff writer
Bill Bleyer in a pre-publication interview. “Ten miles southwest of
Old Lyme you have Plum Island directly in the flight path of hundreds
of thousands of birds.”
Carroll asserts that Plum Island was at the time breeding
thousands of ticks, which can transmit Lyme disease and were
“impregnated with exotic animal viruses and bacteria.”
According to Carroll, government documents establish that in
1978 holes were found in the roof and air filtration system at the
lab and in the incinerator where infected animal carcasses were
burned. The leaks came to light in 1978 after hoof and mouth disease
escaped from one of the Plum Island buildings, infecting about 200
cattle, sheep, pigs, and horses who were kept outside. All were
killed, lest the disease escape to the mainland.

Australia escapes H5N1–officially

March 1, 2004 Dylan Forest Leave a comment

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2004:

MELBOURNE–Australia has avoided H5N1 and other avian flu
outbreaks, so far, but has had some recent scares.
“Our rescue team did a big broiler chicken rescue in
January,” Patty Mark of Animal Liberation Victoria told ANIMAL
PEOPLE. “We got 55 birds out,” 40 of them later euthanized due to
illness and injury, “and there were masses of dead bodies in the
shed,” Mark recounted. “All the dead birds we witnessed were
unusual. We thought this guy was just a bad operator and failed to
collect them daily, as some were very rotten. One TV station
grabbed an exclusive on the story,” Mark said, “then sat on it for
two weeks when avian flu hit [in Southeast Asia] and then dropped it.”
Most of the Animal Liberation Victoria rescuers were older
than typical H5N1 victims, who tend to be under 20.
However, said Mark, “Seven out of nine of us on that rescue
had the usual sore throat, sinus problems, and sore eyes
afterward,” from the filthy air they breathe inside poultry barns.

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