Welcome summer, with deepening water crisis

How good are grandpas?

At least eight people have already died from bird flu in Vietnam and Thailand - after officials failed to protect their citizens while haughtily assuring them the virus was not present. Ten countries have reluctantly reported bird-flu strains: Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Japan, Laos, Pakistan, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam.

"If you saw the films on CNN and BBC, you saw that the people were handling these (chickens) and disposing of these chickens without any protective clothing, wearing no mask, wearing no goggles," said Hans Wagner, FAO's Bangkok-based senior regional animal production and health officer, in an interview.

"If these are infected chickens, then the risk that the chicken farmers contract the disease through droplet infection is extremely high," Wagner said. "So our strong recommendation is that everyone who works on disposing of these chickens, wear appropriate protective gear. That gear is in the (UN) guidelines and is: wearing goggles, wearing mask, wearing gowns, wearing rubber boots and after every day to dispose of all of this gear and put on new ones."

In Thailand, some soldiers, culling teams and prisoners who are slaughtering chickens received some protective gear, including plastic shower caps, but many rural people cannot afford such protection, especially if it is expected to be thrown away each day and replaced. More than 20 million chickens have been slaughtered in Thailand alone.

Traditional baskets, used for moving animals to and from markets throughout Asia, also increase the risk of more chickens and people dying from bird flu.

Infected migratory birds flying south for the winter from freezing northern countries might also be spreading the disease to chickens in tropical South-East Asia, Pakistan and elsewhere when the virus is dropped from the sky via excrement or deposited after foreign birds touch down and forage for food near chicken farms. An editorial cartoon in Bangkok Post has portrayed flying birds dropping bombs labelled "H5N1"-----a strain of bird flu also fatal to humans----- on a hapless planet Earth.

"You have to avoid the contact of wild birds, migratory birds, with your domestic birds," Wagner said. "Chicken farms must always be shut off from the outside world, and nets and fences must block all areas where foreign birds can land or swim to reach chickens."

Eggs are also dangerous because their shells often carry splattered feces that could be infected. "The major risk comes definitely from the feces and from the possibility that the eggshells are contaminated with feces," Wagner told reporters. "It is calculated that one gram of chicken feces can infect one million birds."