Bird Flu culprit points to poultry industry?
Global poultry industry may be implicated in bird flu
A study by the international non-governmental organization GRAIN suggests that avian influenza is spread primarily by the global poultry trade, not migratory birds or free-range poultry operations as has been suggested, and that confined factory farm production contributed to its mutation into its current deadly form. The organization tracked the movements of the disease over time and found that they were correlated, not with migratory bird routes or the locations of free-range farms, but with integrated trade networks involving poultry, eggs, meat, feathers, manure and animal feed. U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns warned that bird flu will almost certainly come to the United States. Read the GRAIN report, Fowl Play: The Poultry Industry’s Central Role in the Bird Flu Crisis. Read about Johanns’s announcement.
