Freeper asks about Bird die-offs prior to 1918 flu pandemic:

[elehhhhna]

"In seeing all of these stories about bird die-offs and culls something occurs to me. If the Flu is going to be like the Flu from 1918. Should not there be a record of such die-offs prior to the 1918 Flu epidemic. I should think there would be some comment somewhere..."

LOL. THIS is your brain OFF SCIENCE...

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1504054/posts

[wakeme2008]

1. IMHO he is correct

if the currently Bird Flu is related to the 1918 Flu, there could have been a bird problem back then.

[The Backlash Cometh]

3. What is the equivalent to the Farmer's Almanac in Europe and

Southeast Asia?

[whatever4]

6. I agree

because I read this today, a week old

http://www.truthout.org/issues_05/100605HB.shtml
Experts Unlock Clues to Spread of 1918 Flu Virus
By Gina Kolata
The New York Times

Thursday 06 October 2005

The 1918 influenza virus, the cause of one of history's most deadly epidemics, has been reconstructed and found to be a bird flu that jumped directly to humans, two teams of federal and university scientists announced yesterday.

And they said specifically that 1918 was a bird flu, whereas later ones were "significantly different from flu viruses that caused the more recent pandemics of 1957 and 1968. Those viruses were not bird flu viruses but instead were human flu viruses that picked up..."

I think asking about world-wide bird deaths in 1918, as compared to what we have now "The research also confirms the legitimacy of worries about the bird flu viruses, called H5N1, that are emerging in Asia. Since 1997, bird flocks in 11 countries have been decimated by flu outbreaks." is a very good question.

[ozarkvet]

14. Valid Question

IMHO, as well, freeper or not.

I would think there should be some sort of record.

As an aside, I have (since ironically learning about the Freerepublic from this site) noticed that there is a small contingent of very technically smart folks there (engineers and the like) that are intelligent on issues like space and biology, along with the usual continget of loons.

You find them on "space" threads, which I read being a complete space nutcase.

As noted here, it's the human interactions that get them.

Bit like that Justice Roberts fellow, I suspect.

[yellowcanine]

2. Check out this logic.

"There weren't large scale poultry farms in 1918. Large numbers of families raised a few chickens apiece. Doubtful, with the war going on, that anyone would have noticed local die-offs."

How would the war have kept people from noticing that chickens were dying?

[The Backlash Cometh]

4. Not to mentioned, that they were probably range chickens, and not

raised in small quarters, like we do today.

[ozarkvet]

13. Asia

Has been doing close quarters growing of poultry/pigs/fish for close to a thousand years.

It's culturally ingrained, which is part of the problem.

[Jose Diablo]

17. Well, my grandfather tried large scale chicken farming in 1918

and lost 10,000 chickens to disease. He was in Texarkana at that time.Wiped him out. He worked for the railroad after that. I know it's anecdotal evidence, but it did happen. I don't know what the disease was though, if it was bird flu.

Large scale chicken farming didn't become the thing generally until antibiotics became available just for this reason. Chickens when confined in small cages packed like sardines can easily get sick and die.

[newscott]

5. Perhaps one of the problems with birds

back then was the fact that people used their feathers for their hats.

It was a huge craze early in the century.

That's one of the reasons they passed the strict Migratory Bird Act. Because people were killing off birds to use the plumage in their hats.

Hmmm. Makes one think.

All that proximity to birds in order to get their feathers?

[TahitiNut]

8. How about down pillows and down jackets?

Chicken feathers, especially during wartime, are very useful.

[pitohui]

7. well they used to say 1918 was a SWINE flu

i guess they are allowed to change their mind, science does change & grow w. new information

but sometimes you wonder why information we have abt 1918 would be better in 2005 (when we claim it was a bird flu) than in 1978 (when we claimed it was a swine flu)

[tavalon]

11. Two words

Genome project.

[TallahasseeGrannie]

9. Um..well, I'm not scientist, I guess

because I wondered the same thing!

[tavalon]

10. Being a freeper in and of itself is stupid

but this question isn't.

[Another Bill C.]

12. The 1918 flu is believed to have been

a bird flu that was vectored (humanized) through a pig.

The bird flu of today has only been transmitted directly from bird to human.

The fear is that the virus will become humanized, either through a human or animal vector, and spread like the 1918 epidemic.

[ozarkvet]

15. Following up on my above post

In Asia, the practice is to grow poultry of some kind and feed the poop to pigs. Indeed the cages are above, so the poop falls through down to the pigs.

Being a farm boy myself, this makes sense, as the chickens (or whatever) don't digest much of the grain, so it passes through.

The pig poop is then fed to catfish for much the same reason.

Sometimes, they have a little skyscraper action going on.

It's very dense and easy to spread things back-and-forth.

And, alas, they've been doing this for 1,000 years.

[rurallib]

16. CDC is being swamped with calls on every dead bird.

People are freaking out. Bush instilling that old fear again.
Well, tell the freeper to check the bible, because that is where all their answers are.