It's a terrible experience, but luckily it's in the past now. You're a domestic bird in Britain. All farmers in the UK have been told to keep their birds indoors in order to stop the spread of bird flu. Tens of millions of chickens, ducks, geese and turkeys are going to be brought inside for the foreseeable future because of this measure. The shutdown of human visitors to the Isle of May in Scotland for five weeks due to island birds affected is one example.
The R number, which can be as high as 100 for avian flu, is one of the most important factors in determining the spread of the disease. In the past few months, Britain and Europe have been hardest hit by the virus. There has been a 6000% increase in cases in the last three months.
Scientists, poultry farmers and government officials are concerned about the outbreak. Due to the fact that the virus doesn't spread easily between us, there have been limited bird flu outbreak in humans. This is a time bomb. There is a possibility that this virus can be spread more easily among humans. The risk to humans would be greatly raised by this. The more chances the virus has to jump into a human, the more likely it is a dangerous strain that will cause the next epidemic.
Humans have been bitten by birds, but they are usually workers on poultry farms and not people in close contact with birds. On 3 November, two farm workers in Spain tested positive and were the second and third known infections of humans in Europe in the last eight years. Handling sick or dead birds is the most common way to get infections.
Humans can get the bird flu if they get it into their eyes, nose or mouth, or if they inhale it in close proximity. The virus is not easy to deal with. The World Health Organization estimates that the H5N1 mortality rate is around 60 percent. The seasonal flu vaccine doesn't work against avian flu, and we don't have a vaccine for humans.
While the chance of human transmission is a future worry, right now the virus is affecting people's livelihoods and farms and putting hundreds of millions of birds in danger. In other birds, such as ducks and geese, the disease can be mild, but can kill the entire population. The ducks have been dubbed the "Trojan horses" for their ability to carry and spread the virus.
Birds are a high risk for bird flu. If a farm tests positive for bird flu, the whole flock is culled. It can lead to hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars in lost income and strain on poultry farms. Going into Thanksgiving and Christmas, the price and availability of turkeys and chickens will be affected by this. It is a huge loss of birdlife.
The issue is how we treat animals and how they interact with humans. Animals are often kept in cramped quarters where diseases are easy to pass through. The more infectious strain is thought to have been developed in an industrial factory environment where animals are kept in close quarters.
This is an issue with more than one infectious disease. In places such as China and India, antibiotics are freely given to animals in order to make them larger and more resistant to infections. Chicken farmers in China all use antibiotics. Cheap and fast meat is the reason for this.
This causes its own problems. Humans can become resistant to antibiotics if they are fed antibiotics to animals. One of the most powerful drugs in modern medicine is affected by these. Antibiotics have made surgeries safer. The procedures used to be life threatening if the drugs didn't work. All it takes is for a person to get on a plane with a novel infectious disease for it to become a problem for other countries.
Animals are the major infectious disease threats in humans. It would be foolish to attempt to stop the circulation of more than a million viruses in the animal kingdom. We can limit the circulation of these in domestic animals. This requires taking the animal-human interface seriously, and knowing that while it is a major economic, animal welfare and farming problem now, the situation is going to get worse before it gets better.
The University of Edinburgh has a chair in public health.
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