If it's Monday the Greek Seagulls must be infected

So trend wise, does it seem to you that these people that are killing chickens are a bit like children slapping the waves down. "Got that one, ooh there's another". I'm not sure whats worse the economic hardship to the farmers, the cruelty to the birds or the lie that it infers real government action.

I was reminded of one of my early environmental planning courses at SUNY Geneseo. A bright Professor named Dick Lamb was talking about disease and debris vectors in landfills. For those not steeped in environmental planning, vectors are those pesky things that are hard to control like rats, seagulls and third world families scrambling through dumps to find things they need, like food. He was saying that the key difference between a landfill and a dump is that landfills focus on sealing each days refuse so that "vectors" can't get to and spread debris and desease.

So there, in that germ of an idea, I suddenly thought ooh, we have infected birds fighting with people for scraps of this and that, excreting poop on garbage which pigs, people and rats also eat, the rats, classic carriers of plague fleas and other bad diseases, the pigs of influenza, merging their microscopic bad guys together and voila we have the newest form of pandemic.

We're not going to stop the pandemic by killing chickens in farm coops. Cull the dieing birds for sanitary reasons and move on. The vectors are on the loose. And killing all the rats and seagulls isn't practical either. Nor is sealing all the 3rd world and not so third world dumps either.As we worry about the avian flu leaping directly to people I think we're forgetting the dumps as a possible vector for the form of the disease which will leap from human to human.

Focusing on slowing the roll, through appropriate curtailment of travel at the right moment, quaranteen of people, anti-rat and mice programs, keeping people out of the dumps and anti-flea efforts could help, but its a losing battle. Maybe we could create a version of the flu that wouldn't be deadly but which could infer enough immunity to keep us safe from that real bad guy. Kind of like burning a fire line in the forest to stop a forest fire.

Vertebrate Pests