The press releases from the prefectures and regional health agencies are multiplying… Weekly for the moment: “A case of low pathogenic avian influenza has been detected in a duck farm (the following name varies from region to region). other… this week Finistère). It is specified each time that this slaughter is “without threat to humans and is not of an exceptional nature”. The press release always includes this little information which may seem trivial: “prevent a possible mutation” and that is where the problem lies.
7,450 ducks from the farm will be slaughtered “as soon as possible”, announces the prefecture of Finistère. 11 e00 have just been done at Les Herbiers. It is a little morbid accounting, but essential … Tens of thousands of ducks are either slaughtered or confined. For the moment only in the west of France, which would suggest that the measure is effective. Its goal is to put an end to the threat of an avian flu epidemic among these birds, which, it must be said, does not threaten humans at all. The threat is elsewhere …
Why these scenes of despair affecting breeders who are already in a precarious situation? Quite simply because it remains in the minds of epidemiologists, these specialists in health figures and whose role is to scrutinize the past to predict the future, the sad memory of the Spanish flu of 1919, which made 20 million officially dead and over 40 million unofficially. An unimaginable figure if such an epidemic occurred again.
One would think that we have the medical weapons to act. It is true, but not on this scale and especially if it is about the appalling virus which one awaits, hoping that it will never see the light of the day, hence these drastic measures against our poor ducks. These farms are the secret bases for the worst that nature prepares. “THE” virus of the century. Because it is not bird flu that terrorizes infectious disease specialists today, but rather the imminence of a diabolical marriage. That of Hercules and Mercury.
Power and mobility
The God of strength is the avian flu virus, a killing machine that nature confines to the organism of a few resistant birds, but which sometimes, for reasons that are not well known – promiscuity, manipulation unusual – makes a noticeable passage in humans. With appalling consequences: mortality close to 100% and maximum contagiousness. Luckily, he’s a fragile, homebody killer. Like his brothers EBOLA or MARBURG who regularly decimate an African village to fall asleep again just as brutally as they had arrived.
The God of travel, among viruses, you know him well. It’s the flu. Volage, he likes cohabitation. This is why it is never the same from one year to the next and that each fall, we have to revaccinate ourselves. He is above all an inexhaustible backpacker whose annual tour of the world results in tens of millions of human contaminations, always unpleasant, sometimes serious and fatal.
Marriage in the organism of an animal
The microbe likes perfect hugs. The result is a new virus that takes qualities from both parents. So if one day, bird flu meets traditional flu, unites and then passes to humans, it is a traveling killer, a weapon of mass destruction which will be preparing to sweep the planet.
Science fiction? Alas no. These weddings are, it seems, happening with a wedding witness … a pig!
The virus travels through birds: ducks and migrating birds, the only travelers with whom it is impossible to control traffic. The landing is with the pig, an animal present everywhere on the planet and which has the reputation of eating anything that comes within its reach. It is indeed by passing through it, an organism surprisingly similar to that of humans, that the virus learns to colonize and destroy us. His apprenticeship finished, all that remains is to undertake his tour of the mortal world. Here again thanks to the birds, but also all the means of transport invented by man …
This is not a fiction
A scenario that the World Health Organization (WHO) has feared for years. The forecasts, if it comes true, are in the event of an epidemic, several hundred thousand deaths just for our country. It is, let us remember, the WHO that says so. Scientists who rather have the reputation of using the tongue of the woods. Their frankness is now chilling. But let’s remember the Spanish flu.
It is true that for a breeder who devotes his life, his hobbies, often earning the minimum subsistence, the death sentence against all the animals on his farm is a tragedy. The community must take charge of the individual financial disaster quickly and without argument. Because this act, which can be considered barbaric, is in fact an essential preventive act, which takes part in the underground fight against an enemy who is preparing a weapon of mass destruction.
.
