By Carolyn Cole/Staff Writer

While believing the bird flu threat is exaggerated, the state veterinarian told Canadian County business owners they need pandemic disease plans.

“How many of your businesses could run if your people could not go to work?” said Becky Brewer, director of the Oklahoma Department of Agriculture Animal Services Division. “What kind of plan do you have for your businesses?”

When few hands were raised during a Mustang Chamber of Commerce luncheon, Brewer told leaders sample plans are available through the state health department. Once developed, the plans should be reviewed periodically and drilled with employees, just like tornado or fire evacuation plans, she said.

Brewer said she believes residents in recent months have confused pandemic disease with avian flu. The two are not the same, she said.
Bird flu is not in Oklahoma, although Brewer said strains have come as close as Texas. However, she said in most cases, the disease has little impact on humans, unless they are poultry farmers with an infected flock.

“This virus really isn’t too happy in humans, but if it’s the only show in town — better than not existing at all,” she said.

Which is how villagers in Southeast Asia were affected. In those areas, Brewer said, poultry lives in the home with farmers, increasing human exposure. Compounded with poor diet and health care and unsanitary conditions, those people in the area are at higher risk because of their close work with the birds, she said.

“We walk down to the grocery store and pick up a Tyson wrapped chicken breast and we go home,” Brewer said. “You aren’t going to get infected by that — that’s not intimate association with poultry. These are going through the house, there are dirt floors. There is a low level of hygiene; there is a very low level of the body’s resistance to disease because they don’t have good nutrition. They are not vaccinated — they are a very susceptible population.

“When they kill the bird to prepare to cook it, they hang it up in the house, probably in a doorway or an open window and let it sit for six or eight days,” she added. “That’s one old chicken, and they let the digestive juices work on that meat and make that meat more tender. There is an intimate physical relationship between the folks who have poultry and poultry.”

Brewer said in eight years, less than 200 people have died from avian flu, compared to 36,000 who die from human influenza each year in the United States, including between 400 and 500 Oklahomans.

While the avian influenza virus has a small chance of mutating into another disease affecting humans, Brewer said it isn’t likely. Health officials are more concerned, she said, if the avian flu infects a person who already has human flu, that the two viruses could exchange genetic information, creating another disease. That process, called viral reassortment, could create another human influenza virus, from which people today have limited immunity, she said.

However, Brewer said the possibility doesn’t keep her awake with worry at night, and the risk isn’t any greater than at any other time in history or the future.

The best line of defense, she told business leaders, is to get the influenza vaccine every year. By making sure as many people as possible are vaccinated, Brewer said, especially poultry farmers, it decreases the chance avian and human influenza viruses will meet in the same person.

“It’s something that is pretty cheap,” she said. “It’s something that you can do for yourself, your families and your businesses to protect yourself, but also your ability to continue to do work.”

Brewer said Oklahomans have much greater reason to want to avoid the human flu. Health officials have estimated between 25 million to 50 million Americans are affected, resulting in countless days of lost work and school, not to mention more than 200,000 hospitalizations annually.

“Influenza vaccine was built off of what influenzas we had the year before and the year before that,” she said. “Flu has a great ability to be able to change itself. So we don’t know what influenza will affect us in the next year, so we make for what we can.”

Meanwhile, state and federal officials watch and train for any possible animal outbreaks.

“We identify, we confine, we stop movement, we eradicate and that’s how we get through an outbreak of disease.” Each animal disease costs producers, consumers and the government about $1 million per minute from the time it’s located until it is resolved.

In Oklahoma, the agriculture industry has a $9.4 billion impact on the economy, Brewer said, including local cattle ranches and farms and poultry producers in eastern parts of the state.

And disease cases, even if unfounded, have lasting effects. Despite years since bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow disease, affected a few northwest American cattle herds, Brewer said there are still countries that refuse to accept U.S. beef.

Agriculture and wildlife officials nationwide, she said, study both ill and healthy animals to ensure the public’s safety. Brewer said the nation’s biggest risk is from smuggled animals and meat from other countries.

“We are out there working really hard to protect Oklahoma and protect the United States against this disease,” she said.

ON THE WEB:

• Oklahoma Department of Agriculture
• Center for Disease Control and Prevention's flu site
• Center for Disease Control and Prevention's avian flu site