During the last month, two infections of the H5N8 bird flue virus where found in the East German state Mecklenburg Vorpommeren. The first one was found in an animal factory containing more than 30.000 turkeys, all the animals in the farm where slaughtered and then shreddered to powder. Safety measures in the area where increased.
Then two more infections where discovered in Holland and in the UK, pressuming that the bird flue could be braught from highly contaminated areas in Asia to Europe by migrantory birds.
To proof this theory, wild birds are shot and examinated. A second infection in Mecklenburg was found just a few weeks later in the body of a wild duck, shot down to be examined by scientists.
Anyway, the chance of possible infections or contamimations is bigger in the long cycle of industrial food production. Nutrition and animals are transported by man on a mass scale, every day, travelling thousands of kilometer until people can buy the end product in supermarkets.
Now there is a strict regime for all those raising birds on their lands: all the domestic birds in Mecklenburg need to stay inside by law, in an effort to prevent future infections. People who go in and out need to desinfect their bodies and their clothes.
There are a few points I want to explain about this practice:
Bird flue is not very dangerous for birds, when they live outside and they can develope a good health resistance system by selecting their own nutrition and by adapting to variable life conditions, wich is generally the case.
Birds for food production, however, who pass their lives closed up in big animal farms, sharing their habitat with 40.000 other birds of the same kind, depending of the same nutrition and who are unadapted to survive in natural conditions, are the most perfect victimes for disease outbreaks. So people who keep their birds outside should not have fear that their animals could get infected, but they take the risk they could infect the birds in big animal farms. Forcing the owners of small farms to keep their birds inside is an attempt to defend the interests of big animal farms.
Also the birds who will be hold inside during winter will loose an unknown part of their capacity to survive outside in natural conditions and will be under stress. Ridiculous measures like displaying romantic music and nature movies on big screens will not garuantee that the birds will have a good time in their new prison. People who don’t have a stable to close in their birds will have to slaughter their animals or hide them from police controls. People who refuse to close in their birds will be criminalised.
The chance that people can be infected is also rare. It is only in the intrest of big animal farms, where animals are reduced to alimentory products; where the risk of epedemic outbreaks is real, the state of Mecklenburg Vorpommeren imposed all small farmers to keep there birds inside. It makes more sense to free the birds from the big animal farms, but then cleanup actions on the fields will be endless, because mass food production birds wouldn’t survive a single day outside.