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Guest Essay

By Maryn McKenna

Ms. McKenna is a journalist.

Farmers in Georgia’s northeastern corner woke up on Jan. 15 to discover that birds in their flock of 45,000 chickens were ill and dying. Within 24 hours, the state’s veterinary laboratory confirmed the problem was bird flu.

Within two days, the Georgia Department of Agriculture sent an emergency team to kill all infected and exposed birds, disinfect the barns, set up a 10-kilometer quarantine zone around the farm and impose mandatory testing on every poultry operation inside it. The agency also told other chicken producers to confine all their birds indoors, and ordered an immediate stop to bringing birds out in public: no exhibitions, no flea market sales.

Georgia didn’t invent this fast response. There was a checklist to follow: the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s 224-page Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza Response Plan, known as the Red Book. For 15 years, the Red Book has laid out how to detect bird flu, cull affected birds and prevent further spread. Crucially, the Red Book mandates that poultry farmers get compensation for birds that are killed by the authorities, but not for ones that have died, which encourages farmers to report outbreaks as fast as possible.

Unfortunately, bird flu is no longer confined to birds. For several years, the virus has been jumping from wild birds into wild mammals, and last March it was identified in cows for the first time. Scientists are sounding the alarm: Bird flu’s jump into an animal with which humans have such close contact is a serious warning sign. If this outbreak isn’t controlled, the virus could mutate and plunge humans into a new public health emergency.

And by all accounts, not enough is being done to control the outbreak. Unlike their peers in the poultry business, dairy farmers have no Red Book for dealing with bird flu. They have been pressured to take instruction from public health authorities, but without the support they need to make those steps bearable for their livelihood. As a result, these farmers have been hesitant to act, despite being maligned for moving too slowly. Unless something changes, the specter of bird flu’s devastation will hang over the United States indefinitely — as will the threat of other emerging diseases.

Scientists have long considered bird flu, or H5N1, a leading candidate for causing a human pandemic. Since 2003 the virus has infected at least 954 people around the world and killed at least 464 — an almost 50 percent mortality rate — mostly in people in proximity to infected birds. These have been largely........

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