Fugls guld

The New Scare is bird flu. Two people in the UK, both of whom work closely with chickens, have been ‘tested positive’ for bird flu. We will leave aside the fact that the test itself is bollocks and assume, for fun, that the test reults were correct.

Right. I can see why schools no longer teach real science because this result means nothing at all. It will scare the pants off those who have no grounding in real science because it sounds like those two people have some new deadly virus. That’s the game we play now.

Oh no! They are doomed! What are their symptoms?

Um… they don’t have any. They are in perfect health. They just ‘tested positive’.

They work with chickens. A chicken with a respiratory virus, indeed a thousand chickens with it, means the air in the chicken sheds is loaded with it. Anyone who goes in there will breathe it in. It will get stuck in the mucus in their respiratory tract. Test for it and you will find it. That does not mean it is infecting those people, it means they breathed it in and it got stuck.

If you work with dogs all day, every day, sooner or later you will test positive for distemper and kennel cough. Does that mean those diseases have crossed the species barrier?

No. It means the air you breathed at work had those diseases in it. You inhaled it. The bugs got stuck in your mucus. They are in there, inert, because they cannot infect you. The test shows positive for their presence, not for their infectivity.

If I were to test you for an E. coli variant called K88, I might find it in you. Then I can scare you shitless with all those pig studies showing how damaging it is. Oh, it is. In pigs. It has no effect on you at all.

E. coli O157 is very dangerous to you. It has no effect whatsoever on cattle, some of whom carry it and drop it out in those large round blobs of stinky brownness they leave in their fields. Still, you could test those cattle and they’d test positive for E. coli O157 while totally asymptomatic.They will remain asymptomatic forever. It doesn’t infect them.

Just as those two chicken farmers are going to remain asymptomatic forever. Bird flu will infect birds, it will not infect bird farmers. It might, but it has never shown any sign of human to human transmission and the supermarket’s frozen chickens have had their respiratory organs ripped out so they pose no danger to you.

So what is this new bird flu bollocks all about? As usual, it’s about money. Money derived from a form of science that the alchemists of old would find derisory. I did suggest this a while ago.

Bird flu has not produced a human mutation. We cannot know the form it would take if it did. Therefore a vaccine for human bird flu is not possible.

If we have a vaccine for the current form of bird flu, why are we not vaccinating chickens? Just let that float around your head for a minute.

Bird men… that puts me in mind of the really old Flash Gordon movie in which the flying people were led by one Brian Blessed. It sounds like a digression but really, it’s relevant.

Because this is how he would have, and how we should, respond to this new silliness.

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‘Fugl’ is Danish for ‘bird’, which should help in decoding the title 😉