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Apr
6
The scandal of a week
Filed Under Bird Flu
Not the scandal of the week, and maybe not a scandal at all, but the BBC is reporting that the dead swan found in Scotland wasn’t discovered yesterday, like everybody initially thought, but was discovered on 29th March. That is over a week ago!
This is alarming, not because of the likelyhood that other animals or birds could have been infected and then moved out of the local area during that week, but because if it takes the UK authorities so long to diagnose and report a case then we have little hope of containing the disease should it be found in multiple locations.
On this timescale, by the time we know for certain that a bird died from H5N1, the disease would have a week to be transmitted to others, who could take the disease into other areas.
To quote from the BBC article: “Samples from the dead bird are being investigated at the headquarters of Defra’s Veterinary Laboratories Agency at Weybridge - which is also the laboratory where all cases of bird, or avian, flu in the EU are confirmed.”
It seems that this single laboratory in the United Kingdom presents a logistical bottleneck in our ability to diagnose, track and contain cases of bird flu - samples have to be sent there from all over the UK and the EU, then logged and processed. By that time, I wonder how many other birds or animals have been infected.
