[Cicero]

Millions of backyard chickens live in close proximity to humans and health education campaigns have often been patchy and rules difficult to enforce with the country's power structure increasingly devolved to the provinces.

I suspect that this is the reason why bird flu keeps turning up in this part of the world, basically because a lot of people are living with their chickens.

Regular flu comes from China, which is the regular yearly source of it. It comes from China mainly because the Chinese live in close proximity with ducks and pigs.

I remember back in 1975 when I was driving my family toward a campground and broke down near Berchtesgarden (the place where Hitler died). We were given shelter by a woman who lived in a farm house in the area. The first floor was a cow stable, and the house was above it. Our very pleasant hostess served us at her table, but I couldn't help noticing that she was barefooted, and that her legs were smeared with cow manure up to the knees. The house was heated by one of those huge blue and white tiled wood stoves, and lacked plumbing. On the whole, Europe was ahead of Asia in sanitation, central heating, and plumbing, but the rural regions took a while to catch up.

That's what you call living with animals, and I suspect it is much the same in most of rural China and Indonesia. Not surprising that they are breeding grounds for flu and other diseases. That's also where the Black Death came from.

[blam]

"The first floor was a cow stable, and the house was above it. Our very pleasant hostess served us at her table, but I couldn't help noticing that she was barefooted, and that her legs were smeared with cow manure up to the knees."

Sounds like a passage from the book, Angela's Ashes.