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The economic reality of avian influenza
Picture yourself in a tiny village in a developing country, say in Southeast Asia. One of your chickens die. Before you know it, government troops are getting off the back of lorries and swarming into your compound - slaughtering the rest of your chickens.
This may in fact be happening more often than you might think.
“For every human being infected, there is at least 1 million animals infected—and that is probably an underestimate,” Dr. Ilaria Capua, the head of virology at Italy’s Istituto Zooprofilattico Sperimentale delle Venezie, said Tuesday morning. “The veterinary community . . . have never before faced a challenge this big.”
I was recently in Hong Kong and was amazed at how much they take the threat of bird flu seriously. Even at the airport there are special areas to clean oneself, not to mention at public parks where wash-hand basins were installed. But on mainland China, it is much more difficult to adopt widespread measures such as in an encapsulated environment such as Hong Kong. In Indonesia, it is much more difficult even to monitor the situation.
And of course who wants to loose their livelihood. There is not much incentive for a poor farmer to report a dead bird since compensation will not necessarily be enough to buy another animal. And while it is often difficult to grasp, but poor people are badly hit with the economics of both the culling of animals and from trade bans causing the selling of birds to be limited. “Basic outbreak-control measures of culling infected birds and closing live-bird markets pose immediate threats to the income and nutrition of individual families,” according to the Center for Infectious Disease Research & Policy.
“This disease represents a food security issue,” Capua said. “It is destroying the livelihood of rural communities.”
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