Bird Flu? What Chicken Eaters Can Do

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For most American consumers, who buy their birds already killed and processed, avian flu doesn't pose a threat, Hansen explains, noting that H5N1 has thus far spread to humans who've had close contact with live birds, bird feces and blood. "Where the [greatest] risk comes from is in the killing of the chicken. You need access to the animals being slaughtered and their blood," he says, adding that U.S. consumers who buy freshly slaughtered chickens at vivieros should be warned if the virus appears here. For the rest of us, "I wouldn't be concerned about the little bit of blood in a processed chicken," Hansen says, reiterating that washing one's hands and all food preparation implements and surfaces in hot soapy water will get rid of food pathogens from flu viruses to salmonella and E. Coli.

USDA's Safe Food Handling Practices

* Wash hands before and after handling food.

* Prevent cross-contamination by keeping raw meat, poultry, fish and their juices away from other foods.

* After cutting raw meats, wash hands, cutting board, knife and counter tops with hot, soapy water.

While USDA advises sanitizing cutting boards with one teaspoon of chlorine bleach in one quart of water, The Green Guide recommends disinfecting with a solution of less toxic, non-chlorine bleach or white vinegar and rinsing thoroughly.

What About Free Range?

While some European poultry producers have brought free-range birds into barns to prevent exposure to possibly infected migratory wildfowl and their feces, some U.S. organic and free-range farmers say they're not ready to confine their birds as yet. In an interview with the San Jose Mercury News, George Siemon, CEO of the Organic Valley Family of Farms cooperative in Wisconsin, said its farmers are closely monitoring their flocks and would bring birds indoors and test them, should avian flu strike in their locales. Smaller family farmers may be more tuned into their birds' health and behavior, and thus quicker to detect outbreaks, than managers of huge industrial confinement farms. "In factory farms, in these crowded, stressful, unsanitary conditions without sunlight and ventilation, these highly pathogenic bird flus are actually created and spread through fecal and oral contact," says Dr. Michael Greger, director of public health and animal agriculture for the Humane Society of the United States.

Greger, who believes that avian flu developed and mutated in factory farms, points out that during the past few decades, industrial poultry farming took hold in Thailand and China. "Once created, H5N1 infected backyard flocks and migratory fowl as well," he says. The industrial farm as pandemic-maker has also been posited by Wendy Orent, author of Plague: The Mysterious Past and Terrifying Future of the World's Most Dangerous Disease  ($25, Free Press, 2004) in an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times. Citing studies by Earl Brown, a flu virologist at the University of Ottawa, Orent traces the first lethal bird flu to an Italian commercial farm in 1878. "The highly pathogenic H5N1 is descended from a strain that first appeared in Scotland in 1959...[and] somehow...found its way to China...," Orent writes, noting that industrial poultry farming "moved from the West to Asia." Sadly, she concludes, the pandemic's greatest victims have been poor villagers and migratory birds, which are being killed in great numbers.