As long as the chicken flu infects very few people, it won't have a chance to do some recombinomics to increase it's GDP.
Getting rid of anything that looks like a bird seems like a good idea. Especially the variety of birds which live in close proximity to people, namely, hens, and I suppose ducks. Are ducks a worry or don't they get H5N1?
Rich places like the USA, Europe, New Zealand and Japan, where there isn't any H5N1, should send places like Thailand, which have chicken flu, a whole lot of money to pay chicken farmers to retire in comfort and make it illegal for anyone to have birds.
The money could be used to buy clean meats, including fowl, from USA, Europe, NZ, Oz etc if that's what people in Thailand want.
It would be cheaper to buy all the hens in China et al, and pension off their owners on a well-off retirement, than to have H5N1 get loose and do a repeat of bubonic plague which wiped out a big chunk of Europe's population.
H5N1 in humanized form could easily kill 400 million people and maybe as many as 1 billion. Assuming only 100 million of the rich world dies, that's about $100 trillion in value [using current road death costings in NZ].
I'm sure all the chickens in China and Thailand and everywhere else aren't worth even a small fraction of that. Say we provide $50 billion in protection money, that's only $1 to protect $2000 in value [$100 trillion/$50 billion] with a significant risk that if we don't do something like that, our bluff against the bug will be called and we'll pay dearly in lost lives and devastation.
Mqurice
PS: Then, H5N1-free hen farming techniques could be introduced to avoid the problem arising again.
King George II claims to be against terrorism. Well, Al Qaeda is chicken-feed compared with the conspiracy H5N1 is planning against the USA. The Spanish invasion early last century put paid to more Americans than all the wars. This one could make the Spanish flu look like a tea-party. He's worried about weapons of mass-destruction, including biological attack. Well, the attack is being planned while he's asleep at the wheel, playing golf, or idly boasting about his trivial victory over Saddam. |
