By José Pasillas Salazar (M)

Graphic by Andrés Ortiz - Mena

Graphic by Eric Liu(U)

The Bird Flu or Avian Influenza is a type of influenza affected in birds. It was first identified in Italy in the early 1900s and is now known to exist worldwide.

The Bird Flu is a virus that has affected the birds and the consumers of these birds. The bird flu affects the bird on a lot of its internal organs, when the bird is affected it only has 48 hours of life. It only causes little symptoms which you can visualize or go undetected. The symptoms are that the bird starts losing feathers and releases few eggs. It spreads very rapidly through the birds.

The people gets infected by direct contact with the animal or with objects contaminated by them. The cases of people getting that virus has occurred in rural or unhygienic places where they have the birds as pets and the birds live freely with them or where their children play. But compared with the animals affected and the humans affected there is a huge difference. Though it is safe to eat the birds but, having certain precautions and properly cooked.

There are only 2 drugs for this virus which are: One known as Tamiflu and the other one known as Relenza. There have been a lot of countries affected by this virus but on the birds.

Recently (from 1996 to date) there have been cases on animals on some countries like these ones:

On China, Thailand, Republic of Korea, Viet Nam, Japan, Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Cambodia, Russia, Mongolia, Turkey, Romania, Croatia, Ukraine, Iraq, Nigeria, Bulgaria, Greece, Italy, Slovenia, Austria and Germany.

We have received news from a human cases on Germany and one in Africa (March 2006).

In conclusion, Bird Flu is a disease that has puzzled many due to the fact that humanity has had difficulties on finding a cure to the disease. Countries in Asia and Europe are the ones that have been affected the most by it. People often get the sickness from some sort of interaction with birds. It has had a negative effect of the sales of poultry world wide.

Graphic by: Dante Ros (M)



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