I once had a bird and her name was Enza. I opened the window and in flew Enza.I'm of Irish decent so I like to tell the dumb joke about the definition of Irish luck: Irishman walking through a pasture steps in cow shit and considers himself lucky he wasn't wearing his
good shoes. If we're lucky the coming bird flu will restricted to animals and not humans. This is probably just wishful thinking because the longer it exists, the better chance it has to mutate (recombine) into something that can be passed easily from human to human. The way it exists now, a human must become infected directly from an animal although there is one case in Thailand that seems to be human to human (a child to a mother).
The flu is now present in chickens, ducks, probably pigs and migratory birds like geese. The thing about migratory birds is they travel large distances. These birds from China are begining to fly to other parts and bird flu is starting to show up in
Russia. As a result of Russia's new bird flu, other countries, like Belgium, are refusing to import poultry from Russia. The migration season is just starting and we can expect that other countries will start to discover H5N1 within their borders.
I contemplate what a world-wide bird flu pandemic would mean. It would certainly have economic ramifications. The U.S. exports a lot of chickens and turkeys and their associated products, like eggs and sausages. The USDA claims that we export in the neighborhood of $1.4 billion worth a year. If all of a sudden nobody wanted to buy our poultry the U.S. would suffer a $1.4 billion dollar hit. And that's just the exports which account for 18% of total poultry production. So we're talking about an $7.5 billion industry. If our poultry were to be infected with bird flu nobody in this country would want to consume chicken or turkey. In fact, once this story hits the mainstream media you'll see poultry consumption plummet. This illness can infect other animals like pigs. A few notable cases of pigs getting the flu and consumption of that meat will drop as well.
The tragic part of all of this is that we could do something about it now except that the region of the world where this is occuring is China and the Chinese have decided that rather than let the world in on it's dirty little secret it will brush it under the rug and pretend it isn't happening. That's why they are calling it pig flu (not a flu at all but historically benign bacterial infection). That's also why they won't share samples with the World Health Organization. It's why they are jailing their scientists and shut down the only lab that was doing H5N1 tests. And it's why they won't let western reporters near this area.
The Chinese are doing this because they learned a lesson from SARS, that potential pandemic illnesses are expensive. They cause exports to suffer and they feel it is cheaper for them to let the infected peasants die than to let the world know what is going on. For more on this listen to
this audio interview by Larry Kudlow.
We are pretty much at the mercy of this virus once it becomes passable from human to human. We have no resistance to it. It's not like normal flu. The only good news I've seen is that some
brilliant person(s) in England may have developed a flu vaccine that works via DNA rather than the old egg incubation method. This means that it can be produced very quickly and a person can be innoculated against all flu strains.
Now is the time for the World Health Organization to use every diplomatic resource at it's disposal to lift the lid on China's stonewalling.
Dow: Down. Going to come back up a bit on Monday and then head south again. > 10,500 by the end of the week.
