RFK, Jr. Wants to Let Bird Flu Spread on Poultry Farms. Why Experts Are Concerned– www.scientificamerican.com
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Excerpt:
With H5N1 avian influenza spreading in poultry flocks, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., is pushing a new plan: let the virus rip.
Kennedy recently told Fox News that by letting the highly pathogenic bird flu spread through flocks, farmers could “identify the birds, and preserve the birds, that are immune to it.”
What the Experts Say
Even with avian diseases that are slower-acting than highly pathogenic bird flu, scientists have struggled to find a key to genetic resistance. Huaijun Zhou, a professor of animal science at the University of California, Davis, worked on a project on Newcastle disease, another viral illness that is also nearly always fatal in poultry but that some infected birds can survive for weeks. “We didn’t find any magic bullet,” Zhou says….
Kennedy’s remarks belie a lack of knowledge about the way poultry breeding works, Koci says. The chickens that provide meat and eggs are not in the breeding population: they’re the product of parent generations that are bred to maximize disease resistance and meat or egg production. Wiping out the working offspring of these breeders wouldn’t do anything to alter the next generations of chickens coming down the line.
