Radical Noesis - Thinking outside the box

I see the Avain Flu as having some similarilites to CJD - "Mad Cow" disease. Mad Cow is reportedly caused by the feeding and processing procedures with cattle. The way that Mad Cow is controlled is by ending the practice of feeding cows to other cows.

The Avain Flu is a different disease all together, but it strikes the domestic poultry "factories." The birds, all over the world are kept in absolutely unbelievable conditions. Tightly packed, sometimes with beaks cut off so they won't damage each other. The droppings from the birds are used for fertilizer, but also for fish food in some places. Who knows what other food that birds and their droppings may end up in.

Millions of flocks have been "culled" by now. That has to be a very expensive proposition. Would changing the conditions that these birds are kept in be more expensive? Would vaccinating them be more expensive? I would think that it would probably be much less expensive than a human pandemic.

The International Monetary Fund estimates that an Avian Flu pandemic would cost $800 billion. Now that is a lot of money. Reportedly there is a bird flu vaccine - for birds. One does not exist for humans and the disease could sweep the planet for years before it came under some form of control. At an economic cost of almost a trillion dollars, changing the conditions in which domestic poultry are kept and raised, and vaccinating the flocks against the virus, would seem to be cheap by comparison.

I propose that if the governments of the world are truly concerned about the possibility of an Avian Flu pandemic, that putting the money into bird vaccinations and improving conditions would be much more effective that the current strategy. A strategy, I might add, which seems to be totally ineffective and very expensive.