Word: chickens
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...painful rash that 1 million adults in the U.S. each year come to know as shingles. Merck is awaiting FDA approval for its shingles shot, Zostavax, which is designed to prevent shingles in those who are most vulnerable to the disease--adults over age 60. Shingles occurs when the chicken-pox virus from a childhood infection is reactivated--usually by the decline in immunity that comes with age--and travels from the nerve cells where it has remained dormant, all the way to the skin, where it blossoms into the condition's hallmark lesions. Zostavax contains a crippled form...
Warnings like that are hard to ignore, and major U.S. poultry growers are paying close attention. In January the industry decided to step up its existing biosecurity measures by testing some birds in every flock for the most dangerous types of avian flu before they leave the chicken house to be slaughtered. All the birds in an infected flock would be put down immediately, and the surrounding area quarantined. "Our strategy is to keep sick birds on the farm," says Richard Lobb of the National Chicken Council. "Once the virus escapes into the environment, it's very hard to control...
...commercial farms with handheld GPS tools (similar to the electronic navigational readers many people have in their cars) and entering the locations into large computerized databases for use in an emergency. They have even used the popular free software program Google Earth to fine-tune the positions of some chicken houses. That way, if the industry's testing program ever turns up evidence of H5N1 infection, officials will know exactly which flocks to sacrifice and where to draw the quarantine lines...
...event, most commercial chicken houses (where the birds spend their entire lives indoors) have no contact with migratory birds. Even free-range chickens are generally not clucking all over hither and yon and so can easily be brought indoors if need be. That still leaves the exotic-pet market (legal and illegal) and the illegal importation of poultry products. Connecticut recently confiscated a load of imported chicken feed labeled JELLYFISH...
Whatever measures the government imposes, commercial poultry farmers are about as prepared as they can be. "You can't stop bringing feed to the farm," says Doug Green, 53, who has four chicken houses in Princess Ann, Md. "You can't stop bringing fuel. There's a certain amount of interaction that has to go on." Controlling that amount is where the difference between sick flocks and healthy ones will...