Bird flu – disease of affluence?

One of my least favourite things about mankind is the apparent inability of people to change what they do in order to protect themselves.

The WHO and other organisations are getting rather anxious about a potentially massive outbreak of blird flu in humans. It is truly terrifying.

We’re talking tens of millions of people dying, and the response is along the lines of… "let’s wait until it gets here and then contain the birds and people it infects, and give out millions of vaccines".

As far as I can gather these bird flu cases are arising from intensive breeding of poultry for meat. It is not clear whether past flu epidemics were caused by this, although I’m sure some or all weren’t. After all such intensive rearing of animals is a relatively recent development.

However, given the close link with the outbreaks in the last few years it would seem complete madness for humans to keep breeding animals in these conditions, given the huge number of lives at risk.

So this is yet another reason to stop eating meat – and world leaders should be working to reduce the levels of poultry farming globally, as it’s always better to tackle the cause of a problem rather than the symptom. This should also help to mitigate a whole slew of other health and social problems.

I also heard on the radio that a major pharmaceutical company has donated millions of doses of a flu drug to the WHO to help control any outbreaks. Call me a cynic but I hope the drug has been sufficiently tested already and that people in less-developed countries will not be used as live trials when an outbreak does occur.

Don’t get me started on the huge amounts of Amazon forest being destroyed primarily to grow soya beans for cattle feed.