Word: birding
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Almost since the day the H5N1 virus was first discovered, India has loudly proclaimed itself free of the bird flu it causes. The discovery that 50,000 chickens have died of H5N1 in the western state of Maharashtra has confirmed what many long suspected: that for a vast country with a chicken population of around 2.4 billion producing 33 billion eggs a year on 160,000 farms, the arrival of a disease thought to be spread by migratory birds was only a matter of time...
International donors at a conference in Beijing last month pledged $1.9 billion for global efforts to control bird flu. The latest news on the spread of the disease suggests this would be money well spent. Over the past two weeks, H5N1 avian flu has breached the heart of Europe, cropping up in Germany, Italy, Austria and France, among other countries. On Saturday, India confirmed its first outbreak of H5N1 in poultry, and began culling 500,000 birds in the western state of Maharashtra. Yet in a world where millions die every year because of diseases that could be prevented with...
...Nowhere is that choice more stark than in Africa. Earlier this month, authorities uncovered a large bird-flu outbreak on several poultry farms in northern Nigeria, the first time H5N1 has been found on the continent; more than 140,000 chickens have so far died from the virus or been culled. Though no human cases have been discovered yet, the news that the outbreak had gone undetected for up to a month raises concerns that the virus may already be spreading under the radar to other parts of the continent. Africa has an estimated poultry population of 1.1 billion birds...
...sheer number and severity of Africa's ills puts bird flu in perspective. Medical resources in Africa are cruelly finite?death tolls rise and fall according to how well those resources are allocated. Africa has no shortage of candidates to compete for triage: an estimated 6,600 Africans die of AIDS every day, 3,000 die of malaria, 24,000 of hunger and poverty. As long as bird flu primarily remains a threat to birds, it just doesn't compare with these everyday scourges. Even South Africa, the nation best equipped to respond to bird flu, faces...
...This does not mean the world should neglect to take prudent steps to fight bird flu?a pandemic could become the greatest health catastrophe the modern world has ever faced. Avian flu is already beginning to cause real economic pain. When infected wild birds were detected last week in European countries, poultry sales across the continent plummeted. But a handful of dead swans on the Danube and a bad quarter for chicken sellers in Rome isn't why we're spending billions to fight bird flu. We want to stop the big one. A report released last week...