Is industrial poultry a non sense?

Nobel prizewinners and campaigners called for the elimination of large scale intensive livestock farming

Some figures and facts

( see The Guardian click on the title)

- Britain's £3.4bn poultry industry, which produces 800 million birds a year
- UK produce 16 million chickens a week in this country and some 500,000 are not wanted
- UK is preparing very, very seriously and thoroughly for the possibility of a pandemic flu. It is a very remote risk, but if it did happen it could be very serious indeed.
- Nothing has given us any indication whatever that this event is linked directly to wild birds," said Lawrence Woodward, director of the Elm Farm Research Centre, who sits on the Defra committee of avian flu stakeholders. "The idea that a solitary bird carrying H5N1 is flying around East Anglia out of the migratory season and then falls down a ventilation shaft of the biggest poultry farm in Britain is just not viable," he said.
- The UN senior coordinator for avian flu and human influenza, David Nabarro, said in Indonesia that he expected an increase in bird flu around the world: "At the moment there are rather a lot of [cases] ... that is why everybody needs to be a little anxious about what is happening."
- In a letter to the Guardian, Nobel prizewinners and campaigners, including Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein called for the elimination of large-scale intensive livestock farming which they argue is "accelerating the development of new pandemic diseases".