Word: bird
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...within four months, the markets were open again. Now, two years after SARS, the wildlife trade is back in full swing, albeit more discreetly than before. Take the Guangzhou Snake Bird Animal Fair Market, the largest animal market in southern China. While many of the market's sellers appeared to be idling away their time one recent day, playing mahjong or smoking, their mobiles rang regularly as restaurants or familiar customers placed orders. "Now deals are usually carried out at dawn or dusk to avoid government inspectors," says Lao Xu, who sells hunting tridents and fermenting jars at the market...
Beyond the scope of the American continent there are far more concerning matters involving global survival that took place in the last week. On Sept. 19, government officials in Jakarta, Indonesia shut down the Ragunan Zoo when tests on 27 exotic birds revealed that 19 were infected with the H5N1 avian influenza, better known as the bird flu virus. According to authorities a woman in the area also died of the illness, while four children lay in hospital after appearing to contract the deadly disease. Perhaps even more concerning, the zoo hosted tens of thousands of guests this past weekend...
From those events alone the severity of the bird flu virus hardly seems to usurp or even credit the media or government’s attention in this time of extreme American crisis. But according to the World Health Organization, countries must now prepare for a worldwide pandemic and mobilize for “an all-out war on avian influenza.” As a reaction the Bush administration provided $5.5 million “in technical assistance and grants” to affected nations throughout Southeast Asia throughout the past year. On May 11, 2005 an emergency appropriations...
...increment in funding demonstrates the president’s true worry about the problem. Since mid-2003 outbreaks of bird flu have occurred in Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Russia, Thailand, Vietnam, and possibly Laos. And, of 112 laboratory-confirmed cases in humans, 57 people died from the disease. With no known capacity of person-to-person transmission, human cases of the virus have been relatively isolated, but the Indonesian Health Minister, Siti Fadilah Supari, warned of more possible victims in her country and forewarned the change to a humanly transmittable strain is “just a matter of time...
Presented with such grave statistics and histories the natural response to hearing about the bird flu is one of great alarm. Now, consider the worrying spread of the disease in Asia, and then think back to the government’s abysmal actions in the face of Katrina and Iraq. If the outbreak of bird flu does occur within human populations it will pose a far larger threat to all humanity than natural disasters or war. And that’s nothing to sneeze...