We live with 6 chickens on our 1/3 acre suburban lot. (My husband worries a lot that he might catch it before it mutates.) We're not unique. No one is keeping a cow on a lot like this. The government has better control over cows.

No one may have randonly shot cows during the Mad Cow scare but chickens were slaughtered en masse in Southern California just a couple of years ago when Newcastle disease broke out.

The USDA is trying to implement regulations that would require a computer chip and detailed tracking of every chicken in the country including those living as pets and egglayers for families.

I can hear Eric now: put this in a post.

Eh, those damned canucks, I knew they'd get everyone in trouble with their liberal immigration policies.

That said, people, let's get real here: only 60 people worldwide have died from bird flu. Yes, there'a CHANCE it COULD morph into human-to-human, but it's a possibility, not a probability. We saw the same hysteria & hype with SARS - and nothing much happened. A couple of hundred people at most. Regular flu kills 35,000 or so every year, but no one's going around screaming about the sky falling for that. We all have a vastly better & higher probability of getting squashed in our cars on the roads this winter, than in dying from any kind of pandemic - which, even if it DOES occur, doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be high-mortality, just very widespread. Furthermore, even if it DOES happen, what are we going to do to stop it? Are we going to shut down travel? Trade? Shipping? Lock down the airports & post machine guns on the borders? I doubt it, because we can't afford to, and in the end, big business calls all the shots in this world, like it or not.

Wash your hands, frequently. Cover your face when you cough or sneeze. DON'T try to struggle thru & go to work anyway; your co-workers will NOT thank you - nor will your boss. Wash your hands some more. Take your vitamins & try to eat nutritionally instead of living on coffee & doughnuts. Wash your hands even more. And get a life. Maybe it will happen, maybe it won't, but there ain't a damned thing we can do about it anyway if it does.

Nancy - You make great points, especially about what we can do to keep ourselves healthy. I certainly didn't mean to fan the flames of overreaction about something that may never happen. In fact, what I was trying to subtly say was that perhaps since people in the US are prone to hysterics, I'm glad this news broke in Canada and not here. :-)

I forgot a few: if you don't have any of your own, avoid small snivelly kids like the plague - & their parents; stop shaking hands, & avoid the 'kiss of peace' at church; WASH those hands! Don't live with poultry as roommates. Avoid Canadian wildfowl. Eh?

Okay, got it. But there's one thing I'm not clear on: you want us to wash our hands?
;-)

The difference between bovine spongiform encephalopathy (mad cow disease for those who can't get around the scientific name) and the avian flu H5N1 is the time lag and the rate of infection.

BSE transmission rates are relatively low, perhaps as low as 1 percent. The actual extensiveness of infection is questionable because the FDA has hired many former lobbyists for national beef cattlemen's groups for top positions.

For evidence of variant CJD, years need to pass and it is often mistaken for other things (such as Alzheimer's Disease). Because of this, autopsies are not performed which is the most reliable way to identify. In the US, we also have CWD among deer.

While cows should be much easier to track, the USA doesn't keep good track of them. There is a case of a US-born cow that was identified with the disease in Texas this year. The name of the city and the name of the farm hasn't been made readily available. The fact that not all of the herd mates, related cows, etc. cannot be accounted for--just as the case of the Alberta-born cow.

Birds cannot be tracked as easily. Although another article in Blogcritics.org suggested that we might get H5N1 here by the mere fact the Vietnamese will not kill their poultry, the actual manner that it will enter the US has been put forth as illegal trade serving the rich collectors of exotic birds.

Scientists feel that H5N1 is more virulent than SARS because the survival rate is lower. Currently, contraction for humans requires long-term exposure to excretions (feces, saliva, etc.) from infected birds. It does not have the ability to be transferred from human to human. This is expected to change, but at the moment has not. For these reasons, the measures suggested above will not be especially helpful.

The first warning was raised in 1957. We've had plenty of time to prepare, but note that we aren't even prepared against more common strains of the flu as evidenced by the distribution and supply problems this year and last of the flu shot.