(Darwin Award)Nigeria fights bird flu with blunt knives, bare hands

[meisje]

Friday, February 17, 2006
Nigeria fights bird flu with blunt knives, bare hands
Bird Flu has hit Nigeria, Africa's most populous nation and the continent's biggest poultry producer, with a vengeance. In one part of the country alone, more than 140,000 chickens have been culled, and that's just the beginning.

In farm after farm we visited for tonight's show, we witnessed disturbing scenes of chickens being slaughtered without proper supervision or equipment, with health officials using blunt knives, without gloves or protective suits, the animals' blood spraying the officials' clothes and bodies.

In some cases, the birds were dumped into pits and set alight. But in others, they were simply tossed into shallow pits and left there to rot in the hot African sun. This, scientists say, poses a problem. Uninformed locals, many of them poor, illiterate and living in remote areas, have been dipping into the pits and coming up with armloads of dead and possibly contaminated chickens. They told us they felt the whole culling exercise was a waste of what they called good meat and that they would take the birds home and cook them for their hungry families.



http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/anderson.cooper.360/blog/2006/02/nigeria-fights-bird-flu-with-blunt.html

[WhiteTara]

1. they trained under *?

sounds like they went to the same school of civil service. What a horror.

[senegal1]

2. That is just the reality of being poor in Africa

I went to so many funerals there.... what is bird flu when you have ebola, marbug, malaria, aids... if people thought about it they would just go crazy so they keep their heads down and live one day literally at a time hoping to be alive the next one. And besides germs are just a western theory while voodoo and magic and fetishes are much more hooked into the power base. They should forget culling -- it was already too late when they found the first bird. However for that bird to get it the flyway from Europe to Nigeria has to be full of bird flu that means from the top of Africa Mauritania on down. There`s just not as much reporting or checking because many of those countries are in a state of war or serious civil unrest or the don`t have much infrastructure to check the extensive area of the country...