Bird flu could force changes to African traditions
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African customs such as using children to rear village poultry could expose them to deadly bird flu and must be addressed to lower the risk of human infection, delegates said at a summit this week.
Experts from around the world are meeting in Mali’s capital Bamako to discuss how to fight the deadly H5N1 bird flu virus and prevent it causing a human influenza pandemic.
“In Africa, it is the children’s job, supervised by the women, to look after the poultry,” Neil Ford, a communications adviser for the U.N. Children’s Fund UNICEF in West Africa, said in a presentation to delegates late on Wednesday.
This tradition was held in high esteem by African communities as it developed children’s sense of responsibility, Ford said, but it also exposed them to diseases carried by the birds—and potentially H5N1, which has killed 154 humans around the world since 2003.
“We have to come up with solutions that are compatible with (Africans’) lives and traditions,” he said.
Delegates from African countries noted many of their traditions involved live poultry.
In many countries, chickens are presented as gifts to visitors and to mark special occasions, or are slaughtered in religious ceremonies.
In Benin, the West African home of voodoo, a particularly risky form of sacrifice involves participants killing a chicken by ripping out the bird’s throat with their teeth.
In open-air markets throughout Africa, birds are kept tightly packed in cages with little or no separation of species, and are slaughtered, plucked and butchered on the spot with scant regard for international hygiene or disease control standards.
UNICEF’s Ford said international agencies helping fight bird flu in Africa needed to talk to communities to find ways of reducing the risk of infection, both among birds and among people tending poultry.
For example, he said, it was common in villages for those tending poultry—often children—to single out sick chickens, slaughter them and pluck them to be cooked, to minimise losses in small households with little food to spare.
Although thorough cooking kills the flu virus, such practices expose the person slaughtering and preparing the bird if it is carrying avian influenza.
Changing attitudes and practices to reduce the risk of infection will take time.
“It’s not going to happen very quickly, certainly not universal behaviour change,” U.N. bird flu coordinator David Nabarro said in an interview.
“Make sure that you see this as a long-term issue, not something that is going to be deal with overnight.”
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