rinse cycle: ANGELS, H5N1, factory farms, and eating close to home

It so happens that I considered watching ANGELS IN AMERICA (the HBO version on dvd) today, as I wondered why it is that we--as a nation--continue to relegate AIDS/HIV to the margins of our focus. The mumps outbreak in Iowa and other parts of the midwest is big news--this week--but AIDS, as epidemic, simmers on the media periphery. Anyway, here's the info about a Dallas production of the first section (Part One: Millennium Approaches) of Tony Kushner's epic work.

May 11-28, 2006
Risk Theater Initiative presents ANGELS IN AMERICA
PART ONE: Millennium Approaches, written by Tony Kushner and directed by Marianne Galloway
at the Bath House Cultural Center on White Rock Lake in Dallas.

For tickets or more information about this production, visit Risk Theater Initiative or call: (972) 943-8915. For more information about the Bath House, call 214-670-8749 or visit Bath House Cultural Center.

++++++++ another threat to public health ++++++++++++++

The owners of Rehobeth Ranch in Greenville, Texas, Robert and Nancy Hutchins, sent the following info about H5N1 aka avian virus, otherwise known as the bird flu.

There is much being said about the bird flu. Most of it is wrong and deliberately intended to lead you to the wrong conclusion for the benefit of the mega-producers. Following is some information that I thought would interest you since most all of our customers want the truth about their food supply.

Small-scale poultry farming and wild birds are being unfairly blamed for the bird flu crisis now affecting large parts of the world. A new report shows how the TRANSNATIONAL POULTRY INDUSTRY is the root of the problem and must be the focus of efforts to control the virus. The full briefing, "Fowl play: The poultry industry's central role in the bird flu crisis," is available here.

The spread of industrial poultry production and trade networks has created ideal conditions for the emergence and transmission of lethal viruses like the H5N1 strain of bird flu. Once inside densely populated factory farms, viruses can rapidly become lethal and amplify. Air thick with viral load from infected farms is carried for miles, while integrated trade
networks spread the disease through many carriers: live birds, day-old chicks, meat, feathers, hatching eggs, eating eggs, chicken manure and animal feed. (Chicken feces and bedding from poultry factory floors are common ingredients in animal feed)

"Everyone is focused on migratory birds and backyard chickens as the problem," says Devlin Kuyek of GRAIN. "But they are not effective vectors of highly pathogenic bird flu. The virus kills them, but is unlikely to be spread by them."

For example, in Malaysia, the mortality rate from H5N1 among village chickens is only 5 per cent, indicating that the virus has a hard time spreading among small scale chicken flocks. H5N1 outbreaks in Laos, which is surrounded by infected countries, have only occurred in the nation's few factory farms, which are supplied by Thai hatcheries. The only cases of bird flu in backyard poultry, which account for over 90 per cent of Laos' production, occurred next to the factory farms.

"The evidence we see over and over again, from the Netherlands in 2003 to Japan in 2004 to Egypt in 2006, is that LETHAL BIRD FLU BREAKS OUT IN LARGE-SCALE INDUSTRIAL CHICKEN FARMS and then spreads," Kuyek explains.

The Nigerian outbreak earlier this year [2006] began at a single factory farm, owned by a cabinet minister, distant from hotspots for migratory birds but known for importing unregulated hatchable eggs. In India, local authorities say that H5N1 emerged and spread from a factory farm owned by the country's largest poultry company, Venkateshwara Hatcheries.

A burning question is why governments and international agencies, like the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, are doing nothing to investigate how the factory farms and their byproducts, such as animal feed and manure, spread the virus. Instead, they are using the crisis as an opportunity to further industrialize the poultry sector. INITIATIVES ARE MULTIPLYING TO BAN OUTDOOR POULTRY, SQUEEZE OUT SMALL PRODUCERS, AND RESTOCK FARMS WITH GENETICALLY-MODIFIED CHICKENS. The web of complicity with an industry engaged in a string of denials and cover-ups seems complete.

"Farmers are losing their livelihoods, native chickens are being wiped out, and some experts say that we're on the verge of a human pandemic that could kill millions of people," Kuyek concludes. "When will governments realize that to protect poultry and people from bird flu, we need to protect them from the global poultry industry?"

The Price of Cheap Chicken is Bird Flu

CHICKEN HAS never been cheaper. A whole one can be bought for little more than the price of a Starbucks cup of coffee. But the industrial farming methods that make ever-cheaper chicken possible may also have created the lethal strain of bird flu virus, H5N1, that threatens to set off a global pandemic.

According to Earl Brown, a University of Ottawa flu virologist, lethal bird flu is entirely man-made, first evolving in commercially produced poultry in Italy in 1878. The highly pathogenic H5N1 is descended from a strain that first appeared in Scotland in 1959.

People have been living with backyard flocks of poultry since the dawn of civilization. But it wasn't until poultry production became modernized, and birds were raised in much larger numbers and concentrations, that a virulent bird flu developed. When birds are packed close together, any brakes on virulence are off. Birds struck with a fatal illness can still easily pass the disease to others, through direct contact or through fecal matter, and lethal strains can evolve. Somehow, the virus that arose in Scotland found its way to China, where, as H5N1, it has been raging for more than a decade.

Industrial poultry-raising moved from the West to Asia in the last few decades and has begun to supplant backyard flocks there. According to a recent report by Grain, an international nongovernmental organization, chicken production in Southeast Asia has jumped eightfold in 30 years to about 2.7 million tons. The Chinese annually produce about 10 million tons of chickens. Some of China's factory farms raise 5 million birds at a time. Charoen Pokphand Group, a huge Thai enterprise that owns a large chunk of poultry production throughout Thailand and China as well as in Indonesia, Cambodia, Vietnam and Turkey, exported about 270 million chickens in 2003 alone.

Since then, the C.P. Group, which styles itself as the "Kitchen of the World," has suffered enormous losses from bird flu. According to bird-flu expert Gary Butcher of the University of Florida, the company has made a conscientious effort to clean up. But the damage has been done.

THE SOUTHEAST ASIAN COUNTRY WITHOUT RAMPANT BIRD FLU IS LAOS, WHERE 90% OF POULTRY PRODUCTION IS STILL IN PEASANT HANDS, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. About 45 small outbreaks in or near commercial farms from January to March 2004 were quickly stamped out by culling birds from contaminated farms.

Some researchers still blame migratory birds for the relentless spread of the bird flu virus. But Martin Williams, a conservationist and bird expert in Hong Kong, contends that wild birds are more often victims than carriers. Last spring, for instance, about 5,000 wild birds died at Qinghai Lake in western China, probably from exposure to disease at commercial poultry farms in the region, according to Grain. The virus now in Turkey and Nigeria is essentially identical to the Qinghai strain.

Richard Thomas of Birdlife International, a global alliance of conservation organizations, and others dispute the idea that wild birds carried the flu virus from Qinghai to Russia and beyond. They point out that the disease spread from Qinghai to southern Siberia during the summer months when birds do not migrate, and that it moved east to west along railway lines,
roads and international boundaries -- not along migratory flyways.

What evidence there is for migratory birds as H5N1 carriers is contained in a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Researchers examined 13,115 wild birds and found asymptomatic bird flu in six ducks from China. Analysis showed that these ducks had been exposed earlier to less virulent strains of H5 and thus were partly immunized before they were infected with H5N1. On this slender basis, coupled with the fact that some domestic ducks infected for experimental purposes don't get sick, the study's authors contend that the findings "demonstrate that H5N1
viruses can be transmitted over long distances by migratory birds."

Even so, the researchers conceded that the global poultry trade, much of which is illicit, plays a far larger role in spreading the virus. The Nigerian government traced its outbreak to the illegal importation of day-old chicks. Illegal trading in fighting cocks brought the virus from Thailand to Malaysia in fall 2005. And it is probable that H5N1 first spread from Qinghai to Russia and Kazakhstan last summer through the sale of contaminated poultry.

Meanwhile, deadly H5N1 is washing up on the shores of Europe. Brown says the commercial poultry industry, which caused the catastrophe in the first place, stands to benefit most. The conglomerates will more and more dominate the poultry-rearing business. Some experts insist that will be better for us. Epidemiologist Michael Osterholm at the University of Minnesota, for instance, contends that the "single greatest risk to the amplification of the H5N1 virus, should it arrive in the U.S. through migratory birds, will be in free-range birds...often sold as a healthier food, which is a great ruse on the American public."

The truly great ruse is that industrial poultry farms are the best way to produce chickens -- that Perdue Farms and Tyson Foods and Charoen Pokphand are keeping the world safe from backyard poultry and migratory birds. But what's going to be on our tables isn't the biggest problem. The real tragedy is what's happened in Asia to people who can't afford cheap, industrial chicken. And the real victims of industrially produced, lethal H5N1 have been wild birds, an ancient way of life and the poor of the Earth, for whom a backyard flock has always represented a measure of autonomy and a bulwark against starvation.

+++++ Kendall McCook, organic farming, and the Trinity Uptown development scheme ++++++++++

My friend and fellow poet, Kendall McCook, believes it would be wonderful if the as-yet undeveloped acreage (he says it's about 60 acres) just north of the Trinity River, adjacent to Henderson Street and east of University, could be converted to organic farming land. I think that would be amazing, of course, and Kendall thinks that organic food harvests could be quite profitable without compromising either the quality of the land or the Trinity River waters. The farm site could feature a public/visitor component, which might draw tourists--including those who are committed to the SLOW FOOD MOVEMENT and those opposed to genetically-modified food aka frankenfood. I shared with Kendall my beginner's familiarity with the 100-MILE DIET, as conceived by two Canadian journalists just about a year ago (June 2005). Given that fuel prices are so high, and that agribusiness produces tasteless food tastelessly (working farmland for maximum yield, employing the use of majorly earth- and people-unfriendly chemicals), why wouldn't Fort Worthians get turned on to the idea of a prototype organic farm project in near northside, just off the banks of the Trinity? It's time for a critical mass of critically-thinking, earth-loving citizens to dream and plan, organize and realize.

BTW--I voted today. Two seats on the Tarrant Water Board Regional District were up for grabs, and there were many contenders. I voted for candidates who oppose the boondoggle and potential environmental fiasco that is referred to as the Trinity Uptown development project. Apparently, what happens on the Trinity, in the Trinity, and around the Trinity is a big deal--with plenty of voices chiming in about what they believe should happen in the downtown section of the river. Flood control and availability of public water are also critical issues.

Do you see how this is all connected? Animal-borne disease, factory farms, food choices, environmental degradation, and community will?