Chicken Soup for the Vaccinator's Soul

“Nature answers only when she is questioned.”

--Jacob Henle

We are fast approaching flu season in the U.S. and it is time for the general public to start making plans to get vaccinated.  It was time many months ago, however, for the Centers for Disease Control (among many others) to start planning just exactly what kind of vaccines should be made available for this year’s version of this ongoing fight against influenza.

Lots of variations on one basic theme:  Ick! Yuck! Phooey!

We won’t go into the abhorrent pseudoscience involved in the anti-vaccine movement in this post (though there is certainly rich material there for many an essay); rather, we thought this might be a good time to speak about influenza generally, and avian flu specifically, particularly as it relates to concerns anyone may have about the possibility of disease spreading through backyard chicken flocks.

Spoiler alert:  Well tended backyard chicken flocks are actually beneficial in fighting the spread of avian flu.  We’ll explain in a bit.

Influenza, or “flu”, is usually nowhere near so serious an illness as to justify the enormous amount of attention it gets each year.  Though it is somewhat more severe than the common cold… it is typically not fatal, and typically lasts for somewhere between a week to two weeks.

The problem, of course, is that word “usually” – when it does take a turn for the worse, it takes a nasty turn for the worse.  The most famous example is the 1918 Spanish influenza pandemic, which took the lives of 50+ million people worldwide.  To provide some context… “only” 16 million people died in World War I over the four years preceding the pandemic.

Why so much death from a disease that usually just sends you to bed for a couple of weeks?

The reason is that the influenza virus is one of the most mutable viruses ever discovered – most of the time, the dominant strain of influenza is one which may put those who already have weak health (the elderly, young children, those with compromised immune systems or who are already wracked by some other illness) in mortal peril (it is a rare year in which influenza deaths in the U.S. do not number in the thousands).  However, in most years, those who are reasonably healthy will suffer nothing more than an uncomfortable couple of weeks of fever, chills, headaches, sore throats, maybe nausea (depending on strain), general body aches, etc.  You know, “being sick”…

In some years, though, the mutated strain of virus is much more dangerous, and ends up generating potentially fatal complications like pneumonia, dangerously high fevers, impaired kidney functioning, etc. in previously healthy persons.

And that is why all the fuss.

The goal of immunization is, therefore, not particularly personal. 

We bill immunization as an attempt to “keep you healthy” but the reality is that immunization is more about collective than individual health.  A population in which a sufficiently large percentage of people have been immunized is much less likely to spread the virus, and is therefore much less likely to play host to the more virulent varieties of the virus.  There will still be individuals who get sick even if they get the vaccine.  There will simply be fewer of them, which is good for everyone.

So how do birds relate to all of this?

Glad you asked.  Birds, it turns out, are frequently the place where the whole story begins.  There are various strains of flu associated with different species, and those which have evolved specifically for human hosts are almost never particularly dangerous.  The varieties which run amok and kill large numbers of people are viruses which originally evolved in other kinds of animals.  On occasion, those viruses mutate in such a way that they can cross over and infect humans – this has happened with swine flu before, for example, but avian flu (flu associated with birds) is by far the most common of these “crossover” diseases.

There are numerous versions of Influenza A, the virus which is adapted to birds, the most famous of which in recent years is H5N1.  This variety has been spreading throughout Asia since 2003, reached Europe in 2005, and the Middle East in 2006.  One case was reported in Canada in January, 2014.

The virus originated in bird populations, and spread to humans.  Which birds?  Well… of the affected populations studied, 84% were domestic populations composed of chickens, ducks and turkeys, and the remainder were wild birds.  So the domestic populations were to blame, right?

Wrong.  At least, not exactly…

The virus almost definitely originated in wild birds, and was then transmitted to domestic flocks via interaction with the wild birds (waste matter dropping into a pen… wild birds scavenging food or water from the flock… there are a lot of ways for the birds to comingle).  Wild birds, however, do not live in confined quarters; as a result, they have a much lower rate of interaction with each other than do domestic birds.

A typical commercial poultry flock, however, will number thousands of birds in very, very tight quarters.  And will almost always have insufficiently cleaned ventilation, food and watering appliances.  A typical commercial poultry flock  is a pathogenic disaster waiting to happen.

Who in their right mind is dumb enough to think this is a good idea?

The response of government to the finding of an infected bird is informative in this regard – when an infected bird is found, the entire flock is killed.  They literally have no choice – there is no way to quarantine an infected bird; if one bird in a chicken farm has it, they all have it.  When you are raising birds in a 1’ by 1’ cage (or “free-ranging” them by allowing 1,000 birds to roam in a 20’ x 50’ barn) then they are not only breathing the same air, they are quite literally pooping on each other and living in muck and filth.  And those are the good farms, where regulations and procedures are being followed.

The sad, despicable truth, though, is that no one knows exactly how many poultry operations actually follow the rules.  The USDA does not have enough manpower to cover more than a small percentage of the regulatory territory to which they are assigned, and even when inspectors are available to review the health and sanitation of a given poultry operation… it is frightfully easy for operators to misdirect investigators away from problem areas.

Salmonella outbreaks are the most common result of disease-laden poultry farm ventilation systems… but one can easily envision H5N1 being spread in the same way.

Enter the backyard chicken flock…

There are a number of advantages to raising backyard chickens, and we have enumerated many of them on other occasions; aiding in the fight against avian flu, however, is one area in which taking birds out of cramped conditions is an underrated element.  Consider:

• The principle dangers associated with poultry farming come from population density, which is not a problem for backyard flocks ranging only anywhere from 4-10 birds, in much larger spaces than are afforded by factory farms.
• Occasional interactions between wild birds and diffuse backyard flocks will still happen… but any one interaction only affects 4-10 birds, not 10,000.
• Human interaction with a flock of 4-10 birds is limited to one household, not the tens or hundreds of thousands (or even millions) who interact with a single poultry farm in factory farming setups.
• While flu can spread via the lungs, it is much easier to transmit via fluids, like, say, blood, which is often smeared all over human workers on a poultry farm, and almost never contacted by backyard birders.

The logic behind a more diffuse production system for poultry related products is fairly simple – for the same reason that contagion is more common in dense population centers, the spread of food-borne pathogens is much higher when the production of those foods is also performed in dense populations.  When the Black Plague hit London, even the superstitious folk of the pre-Enlightenment era knew to head for the hills, because there was danger in population density.

The advantages posed by backyard birding, however, will not be fully felt unless a sufficient number of folk take up the “hobby” and make it a lifestyle choice.  In order to decrease the population density of

Much less chance of contagion, and no equipment to clean.

commercial poultry farming, sufficient numbers of backyard chicken flocks will need to be raised to take a serious bite out of the bottom line for the monsters of the industry (pejorative sense of the word intended) like Tyson, et al. 

Barring having one’s own backyard flock, we would at least encourage consumers of eggs or poultry meat to consider purchasing from farmer’s markets or other venues where small producers with free range flocks not raised in pestilential, overpopulated factory farms make their money.  Otherwise, we will all be vulnerable to the inevitable spread of some form of influenza from factory farmed bird-to-human, and then from human-to-human.  Once it’s human borne, it is out of the hands of the backyard birder or responsible consumer.

Which brings us back to immunization…

We began by noting that those in charge of manufacturing each year’s vaccine have to plan months in advance of distribution, owing to the mutability of the virus (there’s your evolution-in-action laboratory-verifiable example, if you care to argue with a creationist at any point, though we prefer arguing with brick walls, as they don’t spout nearly as much nonsense).  Because there is so much variability, a flu vaccine is really usually a vaccination against up to four different virus types.  Which, obviously, takes a lot of planning, based on data gathered from the previous year’s strains, examples of viruses found in poultry populations, examples found in other countries with which the U.S. population has a lot of interaction, and good solid guesses based on historical trends regarding which strains are “due” for a comeback.

As a result of all this variability, measuring the effectiveness of flu vaccines is anything but straightforward.  In most years (for example 16 of the 19 years before a 2007 study), the strains which actually bloomed during flu season were exactly the strains predicted by vaccine manufacturers.  And even in the years when they guess wrong, there is still some cross-over protection, given that not every mutation of the virus is radically different from the previous version.

There have been many meta-analyses of the data (basically, reviews of multiple studies) which suggest that overall, for healthy adults, vaccinations result in roughly a 75% decrease in the likelihood of getting the bug.  Without doubt everyone involved (particularly those who got the shot but ended up getting sick anyway) would prefer a rate closer to perfection… but remember, the ultimate objective is not necessarily to keep any one person healthy, it’s to keep a pandemic from happening.  If a few people still get sick, but we never see anything like 50 million people dying from something like the Spanish flu again, it will have been an exercise well worth it.

So…

Your assignments for this Fall:  Get your flu shot, raise backyard chickens (or shop at farmer’s markets), try to stay warm and dry, wash your hands regularly, and…

Happy farming!

Pulletpalooza: A Great Place to Meet Chicks!

The 3rd Annual Brazos Valley Pulletpalooza has been scheduled for Sunday, November 18th, 2012, and we couldn’t be more excited.  Four families have already confirmed to be on the tour, and we are expecting numerous others to confirm before too terribly long.  Counting the six families from last year’s tour, and the several interested parties we have spoken with over the last few months, we could easily be in double-digits this year.  We also expect one local business for sure to sponsor the tour, and will be angling to get several others on board.

We are expanding our marketing efforts this year, too.  T-shirts, bumperstickers, the whole ball of wax.  We’ll advertise on local radio, television and print media, too.  We have gone from an exceptionally modest tour a couple of years ago to a legitimate Brazos Valley happening.

This year, we have moved the date from early December to the middle of November for a couple of reasons – first and foremost, it seemed that no matter how hard we tried to avoid it, we seemed in previous years to unavoidably run into scheduling conflicts with Christmas festivities, and this simply will not do.  Second, we would like to have this event occur when many of the coops on our tour will also be able to feature elements of the fall garden to help demonstrate how seamlessly chickens fit into the typical homescape.  If any frost hits local pumpkins, it likely won’t happen before we get a chance to show off our hens.

If you have a chicken coop and would like to participate in the tour this year, please email us at motheromercy@yahoo.com.  A few things to keep in mind:

• The City of College Station will be invited to participate this year.  We are asking the friendly animal control officer who inspects Big Myrtle’s coop every year to drop by and chat with our visitors about responsible bird ownership in the city.  This means if you have an unregistered coop in College Station, you might not want to be on the tour.  Bryan is lucky – y’all don’t have nearly as stringent  a set of rules as we do in College Station.
• Families last year reported that anywhere from just a handful of visitors at some coops to well over fifty people at others stopped by; please make sure you are prepared to deal with lots of folk traipsing through.
• There is no set “program”; some of us hand out fliers with lots of information, others have colorfully decorated coops, others offer treats, and some just show their birds.  Whatever you are comfortable in doing, we are thrilled to have you do.  We’ll want a register of who came by, but otherwise, there’s not much work required.
• We have a pretty good showing from numerous Bryan families, a family in Kurten, and two coops in College Station.  We would love to get more College Station coops on the tour, and also we’d like to hear from folk in the surrounding communities.  Summerville?  Carlos?  North Zulch?  C’mon, we know some of y’all have chickens!

More information, particularly about possible sponsor discounts and planned Pulletpalooza merchandise/advertising gimmicks will be forthcoming.

3rd Annual Brazos Valley Pulletpalooza:  A Great Place to Meet Chicks!

God's House Doesn't Have a Roof

"Sin is cruelty and injustice, all else is peccadillo. Oh, a sense of sin comes from violating the customs of your tribe. But breaking custom is not sin even when it feels so; sin is wronging another person."
-- Robert Heinlein, Glory Road 

Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum recently made waves with comments about the “false theology” of those concerned with environmental degradation. One hardly knows where to start with so patently absurd a series of claims as can be heard coming from Mr. Santorum on a regular basis, but the subject does dovetail nicely with something we have been thinking about – a lot – at Myrtle’s place for a while now, which is the relationship between being a good neighbor and being a good person.

Now, living in the buckle of the bible belt, we are routinely regaled with chapter and verse on the subject of faith versus works, and we are surrounded by folk who sincerely believe that it is “not enough” to be a good person, one must recite the magical incantations from the New Testament (and make sure it is the correct translation!) or the pearly gates will remain shut to you, you gnasher of teeth and wailer of wails.

So our musings are somewhat out of place geographically, even if we believe them to be of paramount importance ethically, spiritually, and communitarianily (if you will allow us a neologism or three, we’d be most appreciative).

In short, those whose theology answers questions like “What must I do to be saved?” (presumably from damnation for the crime of having been born human), or even the more benign “What must I do to go to Heaven?” (though how any theoretical divine realm could be any better than the dinner table set by Mrs. Myrtle Maintenance is beyond our comprehension) are already on the wrong path vis-à-vis real wisdom. Punishment and reward are not the proper sphere for a discussion of God and morality. Punishment and reward are the proper sphere of the kindergarten teacher and the local constabulary.

Any religion worthy of the name has as its basis two senses which ought to be engaged: a sense of awe, and a sense of obligation. Anything else is gafla – the great “noise” or “distraction” – a concept, by the way, which is clearly delineated in ancient Hindu, Buddhist, Judaic and Muslim texts, but which is only hinted at by Jesus in a few parenthetical asides in the Gospels, and absent altogether in the legalistic screeds of the epistolary apostles. We have always suspected Jesus spent a great deal of time talking about the subject, but his more metaphorical-minded Jewish audience was too busy being flogged and starved by colonial Rome at the time to take proper notes, so we are left only with the more literal-minded renderings of whatever it is he may actually have said. But we digress…

The original point for which we were attempting to provide elucidation is just this: no matter what God you may worship – or even if you worship no God at all – the point of theological musing ought not be “What’s in it for me?” but rather “How do I make sense of all this wonderful stuff of which life, the universe and everything is made?” and “How can I best serve those around me, so they can appreciate all this wonderful stuff, too?”

This, of course, is as abundantly rife with what Rick Santorum calls “false theology” as it can be, particularly since it does not even require the existence of God. But we retort that the God described by Mr. Santorum and his like is so small it is blasphemous. If God really were so petty as to judge so arbitrarily and cruelly as does the character described by authoritarian fundamentalism, it would be a moral imperative to rebel against Him. If God exists, then surely [S]He is more mature and emotionally secure than we are.

Otherwise, what purpose does this creature serve?

Praise of God is fine, so far as it goes, but without defining the term in a meaningful way, we find it offensive. If your God is an abusive father who abandons the people of Darfur to genocidal rampages, what good is he? If his only purpose is to allow your team to score more points than their opponents, again we ask, who cares?

If, though, your God only makes an appearance when someone, anyone, notices the pain and suffering of others (be they human or otherwise) and decides to do something about it, then we at Myrtle’s place say “Now you’re talkin’!”

It seems to us, simple backyard chicken raisers that we are, that we are in an interdependent web, and just as we require much from our surroundings for nourishment and comfort, there is every likelihood that our surroundings, in turn, need to be nourished and comforted. At least, it seems that way every time we feed the chickens, or better still as an example, when we feed the cat. Ungrateful though she may seem most of the time, she expresses great degrees of warmth and feeling when her dinner bowl is filled.

Whether gardening, volunteering at a food bank or homeless shelter, reading to a child, paying the toll for the car behind you in line, picking up litter in a state or national park, riding your bike instead of driving your car, or just smiling at a stranger, everything you do which makes life a little more pleasant for those around you is fundamentally moral. By contrast, anything we do which detracts from the lives of others, and makes their very existence a little more difficult is immoral.

God, if there is a God, must needs function on much the same plane. We submit further that any activity which tends towards the care and feeding of others is by default the only kind of prayerful or worshipful activity worth condoning, regardless of what any particular texts may or may not say about the subject. You want to know what is “holy”? It’s a lot like the judicial wisdom on pornography: “I may not be able to define it, but I know it when I see it.”

To that end, we find it truly shocking that a candidate for President of the United States of America would call any endeavor to clean up our national parks – let alone any attempt to prevent calamitous increases in greenhouse gas emissions, or a whole host of other environmental damages done by our rogue materialistic culture – “false theology”; there is more spiritual wisdom in an Ansel Adams photograph than in a dozen papal decrees.  And there is more piety in handing out blankets, or peanut butter sandwiches, than there would ever be in a million pompous speeches about "pure" Christianity and the dangers of letting women decide what to do with their own bodies.

But what do we know, right? We’re just a bunch of heathens. Sigh.

If Rick calls, let him know we’ll get back to him; we’re out back, praying. Or, as some might call it, gardening.

Happy farming!

Lots of changes on the way!

We're changing the layout of the blog, which is only appropriate, given that we've changed the layout of the land (and house!) a lot over the course of the last few months.

The pond is a work in progress, but we've fenced it in, and will be planting mustang grapes and raspberries back there.

The privacy fence which turned into another grape fence is now backed up by a *real* fence built by our neighbors who were worried about their dogs getting loose.  Good for them!

We've cleared out a bunch more yaupon holly in the front yard, which has left room for more herbs; we're expanding our use of african basil next year; we've got lavender, curry icicle, sweet basil, thyme, oregano, and three different kinds of rosemary taking off in front, in addition to the grape tomatoes, cayenne peppers, banana peppers, pimiento peppers, and jalapeños.  And that's not even counting the blackberries, the loblolly pine tree, or the honesuckle we've planted up there in the past year!

So... lots of pictures to come.  We've also decided that since we were able to build rooms for our 10 year old daughter and our 6 month old son (converting a 1 bedroom house into a 3 bedroom house in the process!) we can jolly well build a roof for the chicken coop worthy of our prize hens.  Their current roof survived a hurricane, but let's face it, these ladies deserve better!

Only May... and its almost harvest time!

Our corn has gone nuts. Which, I suppose, is a consequence of a) planting it in exceedingly rich compost comprised of rotted leaves and chicken poop, and b) an exceedingly large amount of rainwater. Much of which fell from the sky, but more of which was carried in a bucket by hand from a pond I'm desperately trying to drain.

The plum trees didn't sprout leaves until, oh, a week ago.

The basil is finally showing signs of fertility, which is good, because it was embarrassing to see it struggling for so long. If you can't grow basil in the Brazos Valley, then there's no hope for you. Bryan/College Station is like Sicily with Aggies. Actually, I've met a Piedmontese who would say Aggies are an improvement over Sicily, but as he had lots of other opinions with which I disagreed, I'll end my digression.

Anyway, the Chickens are still somewhat happy, given the new abundance of weeds and greens, but a) they need a fan during the afternoons, and b) we've taken to hosing them down. Them, and their hammocks. And the reed fencing along the sides of their pen. And we put a tarp over their roof to shield them from the sun. They just might get through the summer without broiling. Mmmmm.... broiled chicken.... sorry, another digression.

You may notice the grapes are doing well, also. The intentional ones are Thompson's Seedless, which are not really adapted for our area, but they were cheap so we figured, "Hey, why not?" The unintentional grapes, however, are mustangs. Muscadine, for the non-native Texans in the audience. And they are beautifully, wonderfully, magically, maliciously invasive. Which is good, because we WANT them. They are more acidic than their cultivated cousins, but when we mix them with other fruit (blackberries, strawberries, plums, raspberries, pomegranates...) they should make some pretty good wine. And jellies. And cobblers. And who knows what all else.

Finally, we're giving birth this month. Well, one of us is, anyway. But the point is, it may keep us from posting for a while. We'll try to keep up, but no promises.

Happy farming!