親愛的馬丁/德夫林/理查德，
Cases of human infection that occurred in villages in China, Thailand, Turkey and Viet Nam before poultry cases were reported, but detected retrospectively, provide the visible evidence of non-reporting in the smallholder/backyard sector. Humans should not be the sentinels for infection in poultry but, repeatedly, this has been the case.
In Viet Nam where I am working at present (incidentally, working on ways to protect the livelihood of the millions of households involved in rearing scavenging poultry) the Department of Livestock Production estimates that about 20% of the total chicken population(close to 40 million poultry) is in “semi-intensive” commercial flocks containing between 100 and 300 poultry. These are not part of integrated operations and are the flocks most at risk from H5N1 avian influenza because of their system of production and method of marketing. Ways need to be found to protect these poultry and some basic biosecurity (and vaccination) help to do so.
These are the farms I was referring to in my posting and not the flocks owned by contractors working for integrated companies, which are usually larger and practice reasonable biosecurity.
Anyone reading the Grain article would be led to your conclusion that “The deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu is essentially a problem of industrial poultry practices. Its epicentre is the factory farms of China and Southeast Asia”. However this statement is not consistent with the way H5N1 viruses emerged in Asia (through geese and live bird markets), with the lack of solid data on the exact mode of spread across Eurasia, with the key role of free ranging domestic ducks in the maintenance and spread of H5N1 viruses since about year 2000, and the occurrence of cases since late 2004 in Asia which predominantly (but not exclusively) involved smallholder flocks (e.g. cases in Siberia in 2005, cases in Thailand in the second half of 2004 – see page 8 of http://www.fao.org/ag/againfo/subjects/documents/ai/AVIbull029a.pdf).
大型家禽養殖場是否導致了 H5N1 的傳播？當然，他們並沒有透過掩蓋一些疫情來幫助他們的事業，但他們並不是唯一這樣做的人。
最後，供您參考，我在新聞文章發布當天閱讀了整個報導。在這樣的論壇中，毫無根據的評論提出其他建議並不是特別有幫助。
問候，
萊斯·西姆斯