Dead swan
April 7th, 2006Apart from being reminded of an episode of the marvellous yet underrated sitcom 15 Stories High, all this fuss over a dead swan has also left me distinctly underwhelmed. At the moment, you practically have to have had sex with the swan to catch ‘flu off it, and trying to stop wildfowl from infecting each other is like trying to nail jelly to a wall with a china hammer. So what we have is something which is almost totally harmless to humans and its spread is unpreventable. But this hasn’t stopped the media (well, as far as I can tell from the BBC One O’Clock News) from asking everyone, from the government, to the poultry industry, the supermakets and the man in the street - “what are you going to do about it?”
Well I tell you what I’m going to do about it. Fuck-all. It’s like the asteroid-hitting-the-earth problem. There is (at the moment) a inifnitely tiny chance that it will kill us, but it really is tiny. Even eating H5N1-infected chicken is safe as long as you cook it properly (if you’re regularly eating undercooked chicken, then bird ‘flu really isn’t your biggest concern). If the big one does comes along and starts killing us off (i.e. H5N1 does mutate into a form which is easily passable to and between humans, and that’s still a big if), then there’s not much we can to stop it. Even if we vaccinate, quarantine and/or slaughter every farmed bird in the country, there are plenty of other vectors for the disease. Unlike BSE or Foot And Mouth, this isn’t a man-made problem. If evolution wants to find a way, it will find a way, which is disconcerting, but at the same time, perversely, for me it’s somewhat more assuring.
Update: As I should have known, the BBC One O’Clock News is by no means the worst offender - ITV News and Chris “I used to be on Watchdog, me” Choi always come up trumps for mindless, doom-mongering yet banal unscientific babble.
April 7th, 2006 at 17:03:35
“If evolution wants to find a way, it will find a way, which is disconcerting, but at the same time, perversely, for me it’s somewhat more assuring.”
Well, that intelligent design thing - it’s not all bad. You have to admit that it has certain ‘poultry and fate’-related good points…
My own motivation for continuing to eat chicken is that it tastes really good. I’ve pretty much had enough of being told what’s safe and not safe for me to eat, on the basis of 1) a considerable amount of bad science and b) the inability of journalists to see how miniscule the probability of dying actually is . Besides, I’m a long way from Fife. Ho-hum.
April 7th, 2006 at 17:04:06
1) and b) are, of course, sequential.
April 8th, 2006 at 09:59:52
The news channels seem to be panicking that nobody is panicking, constantly reporting how shocked they are that poultry and egg sales aren’t plummeting.
I thought the “exclusion zones” in Eastern Scotland are a bit silly, too - they go all the way up north almost as far as Aberdeen, but don’t include anywhere south of the infamous Dead Swan at all.
April 8th, 2006 at 11:57:25
Was this one of the Queen’s swans? Has anybody sent her a letter of condolences?
April 8th, 2006 at 15:19:07
Is it time to panic?
April 9th, 2006 at 20:09:12
The BBC reports that 2,500 people have called the emergency helpline after finding dead birds. Plenty of brain-goo to go around, I’d say.
April 10th, 2006 at 10:39:33
The problem is that people are panicking about the wrong things. Yep, it’s perfectly safe to eat chicken, and so far, amazingly, everyone seems to be being sensible about this.
Poultry farmers have every right to panic, becuse this virus could easily wipe out their entire livelihood; it’s bloody lethal to chickens.
The chances of avian flu developing a human-transmissible form is 100%. It’s not a “big if” - it’s not even an “if”. The problem is, we have absolutely no way of knowing when - this year, next year or in fifty years. It’s happened before and happens every so often - we are “due” another one, but one can’t usefully interpret the statistics in that way really. This means that preparing for it is hard - because it might not happen for decades. We’d better be bloody ready when it happens though - last time it killed millions.
April 10th, 2006 at 12:49:38
“Everyone” clearly isn’t sensible. Otherwise I wouldn’t be hearing reports of supermarkets having signs by their chicken and egg areas to reassure customers that none of them are sourced from Scotland.
April 11th, 2006 at 16:48:28
> Unlike BSE or Foot And Mouth, this isn’t a man-made problem.
Up to a point. However, modern factory farming methods increase the opportunities for (a) diseases to become pandemic in animals, and (b) for the virus to mutate and recombine with other viruses.
In 1968, when the most recent influenza pandemic occurred, the virus emerged in a China that had a human population of 790 million, a pig population of 5.2 million, and a poultry population of 12.3 million; today, these populations number 1.3 billion, 508 million, and 13 billion, respectively (source). In much of SE Asia, the poultry density is 250,000 per square kilometre.