Until last week, it is unlikely that many people outside of Thailand knew that that country was the world’s fifth largest exporter of chickens. However, it is no longer. Because the Southeast Asian outbreak of avian influenza has now struck Thai chicken flocks infecting millions of birds, the authorities have banned all further chicken exports.
What makes this epidemic more serious is that in Vietnam and now in Thailand, a few people have died, apparently from coming into contact with the flesh of infected birds. Health officials locally and from the World Health Organization, which has jetted inspection teams into the region, have been quick to point out that there is no evidence that avian flu can pass from person to person. However, scientists in Europe and the US have warned that if it turns out that this bird-based disease can be transmitted from one human to another, then we could face a serious global crisis.
This is because, as with SARS, which also had no human origins, the human body has no natural antibodies with which to combat the infection. There are signs that the international panic that greeted SARS last year could be returning. Talk of unstoppable and devastating plagues would be as regrettable now as it was then. Years ago, any mutating disease or infection going cross-species tended to stay put where it originated. In today’s global village, with cheap mass transportation, it can spread like wildfire. But this needs to be put in perspective. Last year less than 750 people died of SARS. Every death was regrettable but the death toll on world roads during the same period was hugely higher.
That more rational view should also extend to the way in which we now exploit animals on a truly industrial scale. The majority of Thailand’s chicken farms follow the factory model developed in the US, whereby the birds spend their lives from egg to slaughter in a small, controlled environment within a vast building. Such concentration of animals, which have traditionally had the freedom to roam, produces the same increased risk of contagion that comes to humans when rural populations crowd into towns. Disease mortality in Europe’s overcrowded great cities was dramatically reduced in the 19th century when strict public health measures were introduced. It would seem a reasonable deduction that the avian flu outbreak coupled with the apparent reappearance of SARS in China, are both the consequence of poor hygiene in developing economies rushing recklessly for economic growth.
Sentimental issues about the rights and wrongs of industrialized animal production are quite separate from the very real need to take all proper controls and hygiene precautions, when such techniques are adopted. The chicken farmers of SE Asia need to clean up their act.
