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ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS
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SEPTEMBER 2005
Flu threat spreads opposition to cockfighting
RALEIGH, MADISON, HONG KONG, HANOI––With the H5N1 strain of avian influenza, potentially deadly to humans, striking throughout Asia and threatening to hit Europe, North Carolina Department of Agriculture food and drug safety administrator Joe Reardon on August 18, 2005 warned a gathering of state and federal officials that U.S. Postal Service regulations governing transport of live birds “are inadequate and present great potential for contamination of the poultry industry.”
Reardon estimated that each day between 1,000 and 3,000 game birds, fighting cocks, and other fowl enter North Carolina via the Postal Service. More than 70%, Reardon said, have not undergone health inspection. The uninspected birds are often in proximity to birds in transit to and from the 4,500 North Carolina poultry farms. Birds involved in human food production are inspected, but may then be exposed to disease before reaching their destination.
North Carolina agriculture commissioner Steve Troxler and U.S. Representative Walter Jones (R-Farmville) pledged to pursue legislation which would require all birds sent by mail to have a health certificate.
Also responding to the risk of cockfighters spreading H5N1 or other diseases potentially injurious to the poultry industry, the North Carolina legislature on August 21 sent to Governor Mike Easley a bill to make cockfighting a felony.
The National Chicken Council, representing the commercial poultry industry, has joined the Humane Society of the U.S. and more than 300 law enforcement agencies in supporting a pending federal bill that would raise from a misdemeanor to a felony the penalty for transporting birds interstate in connection with illegal fighting.
Cockfighting is now illegal in all states except New Mexico and Louisiana–– although Montgomery District Judge William Lane of Mount Sterling, Kentucky, put enforcement of the Kentucky law in question on August 15 by dismissing charges against about 450 of more than 500 people who were arrested at an April 16, 2005 cockfight. Lane pointed to language in the Kentucky law against attending an animal fight that specifies fights between four-legged animals.
Animal advocates have sought to outlaw cockfighting for longer than there has been an organized humane movement, chiefly to prevent cruelty but also in part to stop the spread of diseases such as Newcastle, which have historically been controlled by killing whole flocks.
Animal advocates have argued for tightening U.S. Postal Service regulations pertaining to live bird transport at least since 1989, when letter carrier Sue Ellen Williams, as corresponding secretary for the Bristol Humane Society in Bristol, Virginia, won a favorable but often ignored amendment to the rules for handling birds who cannot be delivered promptly.
The H5N1 avian flu strain was first identified after it killed a three-year-old boy in Hong Kong on May 21, 1997, but is believed to have occurred earlier in southern China. H5N1 is the only known flu strain that can cross directly from birds to humans, without an intermediary host such as pigs.
As many as 100 million domestic birds have either died of H5N1 or have been culled in futile “stamping out” exercises since the disease began rapidly spreading in Southeast Asia during fall 2003.
United Nations Food & Agricultural Organization chief veterinary officer Joseph Domenech warned at a July 4, 2005 conference in Kuala Lumpur that, “In some countries that are heavily infected, there is no way to get rid of the disease with pure stamping out methods, and vaccination must be used.”
At the time, H5N1 was believed to have been stamped out in Thailand, mostly by ruthless culls. Millions of birds were burned or buried alive––but cockfighters resisted any measures that restricted their activity.
Only one day before Thai officials were due to declare the nation officially free of H5N1, 90 days after the last reported new case, H5N1 reappeared among gamecocks in early July at four locations in Suphan Buri.
Estimating that only about 400,000 of the national gamecock flock of about one million have been registered, in compliance with a year-old edict meant to track and control H5N1, the Thai interior ministry ordered provincial governors to close all cockfighting stadiums. By July 14, under organized political pressure from cockfighters, the order was amended into a plan to discuss regulation of cockfighting.
Already, new H5N1 outbreaks had also occurred in Indonesia, where 21 out of 30 provinces have been hit so far. The Medan daily newspaper Kompas reported that a smuggled Thai gamecock might have taken H5N1 to North Sumatra. “We have identified the owner of the fighting cock and he has admitted to smuggling it,” a local official told Kompas.
Outbreaks also recurred in Japan, beginning in June. Some previous Japanese outbreaks have been linked to cockfighting.
H5N1 reached Kazakhstan and Russia in late July 2005, and appeared in Mongolia during the first days of August. By August 25, H5N1 had hit poultry farms in 46 Russian settlements and was suspected in bird deaths at 80 more sites, scattered across seven regions of southern Russia, some as far west as the Ural mountains. H5N1 was also found in a wild duck shot near the village of Verkh-Karaguzh in the Altai Republic of Siberia.
In addition, H5N1 had appeared in six regions of Kazakhstan.
Waterfowl blamed
Public officials throughout Asia blamed wild waterfowl for spreading H5N1. Blaming the domestic poultry industry was sufficiently unpopular that on May 30 the University of Hong Kong and Shantou University halted studies of H5N1, under Chinese agriculture ministry pressure. University of Hong Kong virologist Guan Yi and team had just published articles in the journals Nature and Science concluding that an H5N1 outbreak at the Qinghai Lake Nature Reserve in 2004 resulted from “a single introduction, most probably from poultry in southern China.”
“Reports of the role of wild birds as the cause of new bird flu outbreaks occur almost daily, but at the present time there is little evidence to support such statements,” commented Hon S. Ip of the U.S. Geological Survey National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wisconsin.
“In many of the areas of recent outbreaks,” Ip pointed out on August 24 via the Society for Infectious Diseases’ electronic bulletin board ProMed, “there is a thriving trade in live birds and poultry products. There is no evidence of sustained human-to-human transmission ,” Ip acknowledged, “but because the virus can survive in poultry droppings for up to two weeks, movement of people and contaminated farm equipment can rapidly spread it. Much has been made of the recent pattern of spread as indicative of avian migration,” Ip concluded, “but many ornithologists have indicated that the spread of H5N1 does not fit with the known behavior of the bird species in that area of the world.”
A paper entitled Origin and evolution of highly pathogenic H5N1 avian influenza in Asia, co-authored by seven United Nations Food & Agriculture Organization scientists, published in the August 6 edition of Veterinary Record, argued that “There is little reason to believe that wild birds have played a more significant role in spreading disease than trade through live bird markets and movement of domestic waterfowl.”
Added ProMed moderator Armon Shimshony, an associate professor at the Koret School of Veterinary Medicine, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, “During early stages of the outbreak, it was argued that the pattern of spread strongly suggested that the virus was carried by people smuggling poultry, rather than by migratory birds. Though there were reports of mass die-offs of rare birds in zoos in Thailand, regular monitoring of migratory birds in Thailand did not reveal the virus. In regions with big outbreaks in poultry, local wild birds were affected; the question remained as to whether their infection did not originate from the domestic birds.”
ANIMAL PEOPLE pointed out through ProMed on August 27 that cockfighting is widely practiced in Central Asia, including Kazakhstan, Mongolia, and nearby parts of Russia, and that a common Central Asian variant of cockfighting pits freshly captured wild songbirds against each other. The birds are often held by threads while they fight. To avoid violating the Islamic prohibition on keeping wild birds captive, both birds may be released as soon as one bird emerges dominant enough to satisfy the bettors.
Wild bird fights often occur in the same pits as cockfights, offering a quick vector for disease transmission to other wild birds.
Public health
With H5N1 close enough to menace Europe, the Dutch agriculture ministry on August 22 ordered that all free-ranging captive bird flocks be brought indoors. European Union officials objected that the Dutch order appeared to contravene EU law, contending that such orders may be issued only by the European Commission after consultation with experts from all 25 EU member states.
Factory-style poultry producers have argued that preventing H5N1 is a reason for raising birds entirely in confinement, but H5N1 has also hit many confinement poultry barns in Southeast Asia. Workers with clothing contaminated from attending cockfights are suspected of transmitting the disease from barn to barn.
The pharmaceutical maker Roche donated three million treatment courses of the antiviral drug oseltamivir to the World Health Organization, to enable WHO to respond quickly if H5N1 appears to be crossing over from birds to humans.
The H5N1-fighting capability of the other leading antiviral drug, amantadine, may have been compromised by illegal use in poultry. Resistant H5N1 strains have reportedly been found in Thailand and Vietnam. The Chinese ministry of agriculture warned farmers against using amantadine in June, after denying a Washing-ton Post report that it had encouraged giving amantadine to chickens.
As using amantadine would not be cost-effective in poultry, Shimshony of ProMed asked whether the alleged illegal administration might be “undertaken to protect selectively expensive birds, such as fighting cocks.” No response was posted.
French agriculture minister Renate Kunast called for a crackdown on illegal bird trafficking. Edir Delhaye of the French environmentalist party Cap21 noted the proximity of free-range poultry farms to heavily hunted seasonal concentrations of migratory waterfowl. Shooting birds near a free-range poultry farm would increase the risk of an infected bird falling among a domestic flock.
Despite that verity, the Russian news agency Itar-Tass reported on August 17 that local officials in Irkutsk, Siberia, and Penza, Russia, had opened the waterfowling season early, ostensibly so that hunters could kill the alleged threat from migratory birds. Shimshony called that logic “eyebrow-raising.”
Vietnam, with 42 of the 61 known human H5N1 fatalities, on August 29 began trying to vaccinate all 4.2 million poultry and domestic waterfowl in Hanoi. Deputy director of agriculture and rural development Dao Duy Tam told Agence France-Presse that 50% of the waterfowl transported into Hanoi and 10% of those raised locally had tested positive for H5N1.
The Hanoi vaccination drive is to be a test of strategies for trying to vaccinate all 200 million domestic chickens and ducks in Vietnam between September 15 and September 30, following the examples of China and Indonesia, where vaccination efforts are still incomplete. Vietnam accelerated plans for the mass vaccination after H5N1 was found to have killed three of 23 Owston civets who were raised in a cage at Cuc Phuong National Park in Ninh Binh province. Why the three civets became ill but not the other 20 was unknown. They died in June but the cause was not confirmed until the third week in August.
Health officials in Ben Tre province, Vietnam, meanwhile learned how one of the most recent human victims contracted H5N1: the 30-year-old man ate sick gamecocks, believing like many other residents of his village that they would be immune.