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So, a million chickens and other birds in Hong Kong are either dead from avian flu or have been culled for prophylactic reasons since the first big outbreak there in 1997.
More than two million birds have been culled in South Korea. Five million in Virginia. Six million in Thailand. Twenty-eight million in the Netherlands and Belgium. Forty-three million in Vietnam.
And now 19 million are to be slaughtered here in the Lower Mainland in what may yet prove a futile attempt to contain the spread of avian flu, which can be spread by manure or secretions on farm workers' clothing.
Let's see, that's already a mortality of more than 100 million birds with the numbers still rising as different strains of the highly contagious viral disease pop up in Pakistan, Cambodia, Texas, Laos, Maryland, Japan, Pennsylvania, Taiwan and Maine.
The cost to the poultry industry so far must certainly be in the hundreds of millions of dollars US, perhaps well into the billions. That's without even trying to calculate the human cost in lost income, lost jobs, lost investments, lost hope and lost lives among those stricken by the more virulent variety of the virus.
Gee, is there a pattern here? You bet there is, and it's not just with chickens, turkeys, ducks and geese.
There were the six million British cattle that went to the incinerator over the last decade to prevent the further spread of bovine spongiform encephalopathy to the human population. Not to mention the four million or more cattle destroyed to prevent the spread of hoof and mouth disease in the United Kingdom. Then there were the 3.8 million pigs that had to be put down for the same reason in Asia not long ago.
I know it's hard for most people to muster much sympathy for crustaceans, but there were the millions upon millions of shrimp that perished when a lethal virus emerged in Asia in 1994, swept through farms in China, Thailand, India, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Taiwan, Vietnam and Japan, then invaded shrimp farms in Central America and the U.S.
Mortality rates rocketed to the point where affected shrimp farms could lose 50 per cent to 95 per cent of their production in a week. The financial damage there -- maybe $1 billion U.S.
And we have the mass deaths of farmed salmon, of course. You can measure the disease mortalities in that industry in the millions of creatures, too, although accurate numbers are hard to come by-- especially here in B.C. where the provincial government posts the mortality data in arcane tables that practically demand a PhD in statistics to figure out.
We do know, however, that since 1996, around four million domesticated salmon have died or been culled on New Brunswick fish farms in an attempt to contain the infectious salmon anemia virus. It got so bad there that in 1998 the government ordered one in four salmon farms to be fallowed for a full year.
We also know that millions of farmed salmon -- some say four million -- died last year in Scotland when jellyfish attracted to the net pens arrived in such numbers they clogged gills and starved the captured fish of oxygen. The fish suffocated in their pens.
Here in B.C., 36 fish farms stocked with Atlantic salmon developed outbreaks of the fatal viral disease infectious hematopoietic necrosis between August 2001 and June 2003. It followed an earlier outbreak of the same disease in B.C. salmon farms between 1992 and 1996.
Some theorize that the origin of the IHN epidemics on fish farms could lie in wild salmon stocks that are known to be natural carriers of the virus, just as the avian flu epidemics afflicting domestic poultry flocks in the Fraser Valley might be traced to wild ducks.
But what's really important here isn't so much the origin of the infection as the propensity of unnaturally dense populations of domestic livestock in factory farming operations to serve as amplifiers for diseases that don't spread nearly so rapidly in the wild because populations are smaller and more dispersed.
Frankly, this is the pattern that should scare the pants off everyone.
First, we know that bird flu has already jumped the species barrier into the human population both here and in Asia.
Second, we know that the World Health Organization is worried about it mutating into a form that is easily transmissible and for which humans have no natural immunity, triggering a lethal global pandemic.
Third, if you think about it for a minute, you quickly realize that the largest and most dense population of animals in which some exotic virus might find the ideal vehicle for amplification -- just like the avian flu in domestic poultry flocks -- is our own.
There are six billion of us, certainly the highest population density for any of the higher animals. We largely live in congested urban conditions in which we are constantly in close contact and we have developed mass transit technologies that accelerate travel and increase that contact.
I'd say you don't have to be an animal rights fanatic to start wondering whether we shouldn't revisit our whole approach to intensive factory farming and reconsider what risks we're prepared to accept collectively in the interests of short-term economic benefits for producers and consumers.
shume@islandnet.com
