What is bird flu and how is it linked to chicken farming?
Bird flu may not be deadly yet, but it could be the source of the next pandemic.
Matthew Chalmers
Bird flu may not be deadly yet, but it could be the source of the next pandemic.
Avian influenza or bird flu has been on the rise in the UK and mass cullings have made the headlines, but how serious is this problem?
What is the bird flu outbreak?
Since December 2021 the UK has been plagued by an outbreak of bird flu, which the Animal and Plant Health Agency has described as the country’s largest ever.
This has been disastrous both for farmers and for the nation’s birds.
The government response has been swift and severe. The first case of avian influenza in this most recent outbreak was detected in Lincolnshire on 11th December 2021. Less than one month later one million chickens had been culled. Animal charity Open Cages published footage of mountains of dead chickens being dumped by diggers into pits.
The disease has spread and outbreaks have been numerous, with some 76 separate outbreaks recorded at the time of writing. The virus has been found in chickens, Canada geese, swans and now seagulls.
If the virus fails to kill the farmed birds then government agencies are sure to, normally culling the animals with CO2 gas.
Why is bird flu dangerous?
More worryingly, the virus has also spread to humans.
It must be emphasised that at present it is believed that the likelihood of a bird giving a human bird flu, or an infected person passing it on to another person, is very low.
However, avian influenza can survive on manure on peoples’ shoes for months at a time.
Yet as we have seen with Coronavirus, the danger lies not so much in what bird flu is now, but in what it could mutate into.
Could bird flu be the next pandemic?
The Spanish Influenza outbreak of 1918 is thought to have killed at least 50 million people worldwide and very likely originated in birds - although whether it first developed in wild or domestic birds is unknown.
The Covid 19 pandemic also likely originated in animals. All the while, new strains of bird flu are developing in the cramped and dirty confines of chicken sheds and factory farms across the globe.
The world's 33 billion chickens may well be the source of the next pandemic, and current outbreaks of avian influenza prove that even strong biosecurity measures can fail to prevent diseases leaking out of animal agriculture.
How can we stop avian flu?
We must come together as a society and a species and urgently ask ourselves if confining this amount of stressed and suffering animals is worth it given the risk it poses to them and ourselves.
Intensive animal agriculture endangers our health contributing to the emergence of zoonotic disease and antibiotic resistant bacteria (which now kill more people than malaria or AIDS), it pollutes our environment and brutalises animals and slaughterhouse workers.
Plant-based foods provide a better option for both human civilisation and the countless animals who live and cruelly die at our mercy.
Birds, most of whom were destined for slaughter anyway, are the victims for now. Next time it could be us.
