High levels of stress can lead to weakened immunity, rendering animals much more susceptible to disease. This makes the average poultry factory farm a hotbed for outbreaks of avian flu.
Great Britain had a much different situation than we do and did here in the United States, in that they had literally thousands of infected animals with human health risks. Their infectivity in this disease happened before very much was known about it.
The avian influenza found in mainland British Columbia poses no significant threat to human health.
It entered Egypt at the end of the season when the grasslands turn green, hence in the autumn of the year 748…This epidemic was distinctive in that it did not particularly affect one region and leave another untouched but spread to all parts of the Earth, in the East as in the West…Furthermore, it encompassed not just the human species but also the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, and the animals in the field…
If you have 100 acres worth of food, and you've got 500 animals out there, the young ones and the old ones are going to starve to death because they can't compete. When they starve, they start to eat things they shouldn't be eating and spread disease not only to them but to us.
Disease is not the prerogative of man and the domestic animals, so it was quite natural to see if the lower animals, with very simple organizations, showed pathological phenomena, and if so, infection, cure and immunity could be observed among them.
The difference between H7N9 and H5N1, is that H5N1 kills chickens very rapidly, so it is easy to identify where the infected flocks of chickens are. H7N9 doesn't make the chicken sick, so it has been difficult to pinpoint where the infected chickens are.
We have to use every tool at our disposal and that's why we're trialing a badger cull. We need healthy wildlife living alongside healthy cattle. Only if we work to eradicate the reservoir of TB in our badgers, will we have the strong and prosperous dairy industry the public wishes to see.
The largest outbreak of bird flu in American history was an H5N2 virus, which led to the deaths of 17 million domestic birds and cost the nation more than $400 million during an outbreak in Pennsylvania that started in 1983.
Though pigs have been proven susceptible to a porcine spongiform encephalopathy, the National Pork Producers Council claims that no naturally occurring cases of 'mad pig' disease have ever been discovered.
If there is delay in getting culling teams out, delay in any part of the chain, even weeks, that could have great implications for the virus to spread.
But the fact of the matter is that all scientific evidence would show, based upon what we know about this disease, that muscle cuts - that is, the meat of the animal itself - should not cause any risk to human health.
The only thing they (the English) have ever done for European agriculture is mad cow disease.
