I have absoultely no doubt that the scenario MSNBC presented is feasable. But it is still fiction. Woulda, Shoulda, Coulda.
The bottom line is that there are a lot of professional people out in the world, actively studying how best to prevent the spread of avian flu, on many different levels.
The biggest thing that protects the US by default is that our domestic poultry industry has been raising birds for years in almost complete isolation from outside contamination from diseases that are known to be spread by migrating flocks of wild birds. You cannot even drive onto the property of a commercial chicken farm without having your car, and shoes decontaminated, but you'll also be donning a protective suit; to protect the birds from what you might be bringing in to them
Asia has been hit particularly hard because their animal husbandry is much different from ours, in that their poultry is raised by citizens all over the place, in the open air, where they are easily contaminated and infected from migrating wild birds..
A tangential issue that deserves mention as well is the fact that there hasn't been a case of porcine-transmitted trichinosis in the US since the sixties, because we improved dramatically, the conditions under which we raise hogs, and have essentially eliminated that hazard from our foodchain...
I just do not believe that it is possible to have another pandemic like the media keeps predicting. Not only does the US lead the world in safe production of food, our Medicine and Sanitation standards are light years beyond what they were at the turn of the last century. It's certainly possible for an outbreak to occur, but I simply do not believe that it would be able to spread very far before it could be stopped. To believe that is to give way too much credibility to MSNBC, instead of the entire health care industry, and all of Medical Science.
IMHO, MSNBC produced a pretty good made for TV featurette, but that is all. It is not News, it is Fiction.
So are you contending that our food is safer due to confinement operations?
I did not see the MSNBC program and so can't comment, but I am inclined to agree with you that here in the US such an outbreak will most likely not be of similar proportion to the 1918 Spanish Flu.
However, with that said, the economic ramifications of an outbreak of Avian Flu can and most likely will reach catastophic proportion to the poultry industry. One bird testing positive leads to the destruction of an entire flock. The 5 chicken house across the road from me currently house 170,000 chickens, those house only represent a third of the stock that one particular farmer has..........and there are hundreds just like him in this tri-state region.
>>>>The biggest thing that protects the US by default is that our domestic poultry industry has been raising birds for years in almost complete isolation from outside contamination from diseases that are known to be spread by migrating flocks of wild birds. You cannot even drive onto the property of a commercial chicken farm without having your car, and shoes decontaminated, but you'll also be donning a protective suit; to protect the birds from what you might be bringing in to them
AND yet....
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1618633/posts
U.S. to Allow China Processed Poultry In