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China-Japan-Koreas
Bird flu kills 1,800 ducks in China
2006-08-16
This is what it looks like when baby ducks die.
BEIJING - About 1,800 ducks have died from bird flu at a farm in in Changsha, capital of Hunan province, central China, and more than 210,000 have been culled, the online edition of Xinhua news agency said on Tuesday.

A national laboratory confirmed on Monday the ducks had died from the H5N1 bird flu virus, it said.
Posted by:Steve White

#6  W: Twice a year, birds migrate, therefore, twice a year, the bird flu can be spread from continent to continent. The people of the world may not be doomed, but the poultry industry sure is.

This is true only if the poultry are allowed to run around in the open air. The American poultry industry grows its birds indoors in cages. Even poultry being grown outdoors can be isolated via netting. It's just not that big of a problem. Sanitation practices in China are crap. And yet the H5N1 infection rate there is negligible. Which goes to show that the disease is usually fatal, but not all that infectious, at least with respect to humans. Epidemic-scale infection is really hard to hide, because there are lots of foreign Asian reporters in China who can blend.
Posted by: Zhang Fei   2006-08-16 21:06  

#5  Interesting. Thanks.
Posted by: lotp   2006-08-16 13:37  

#4  FAO for 2003
125 of 2940 calories/capita/day. 52 poultry meat 73 eggs.

Of the 2940 c/c/d about half is cereal and half of that is rice. The next greatest source of calories after rice and wheat is pigmeat 343 c/c/d, over 10% of the cal/cap/day. Islam's going to have a problem there.
Posted by: Nimble Spemble   2006-08-16 12:56  

#3  For a little perspective, the U.S. poultry industry produced 8.9 BILLION "broiler" chickens in 2005.
http://www.ers.usda.gov/News/broilerCoverage.htm
Posted by: Darrell   2006-08-16 12:36  

#2  I wonder how central the poultry industry is to Chinese food supply.
Posted by: lotp   2006-08-16 12:13  

#1  H5N1 coming to an emergency room near you.
Twice a year, birds migrate, therefore, twice a year, the bird flu can be spread from continent to continent. The people of the world may not be doomed, but the poultry industry sure is.
Posted by: wxjames   2006-08-16 11:52  

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