No Avian Flu Threat from Eating Thanksgiving Turkey

“Eat your Thanksgiving turkey this year and pay no mind to avian flu fears.”

That’s the straightforward advice by an Alabama Cooperative Extension System food scientist to the millions of Americans who mistakenly believe that they can contract bird flu by eating poultry.

A study commissioned by the nonprofit Center for Consumer Freedom and conducted by the Opinion Research Corporation revealed that 47 percent of participants --- 42 percent of college graduates --- agreed with the false statement that eating an infected chicken could result in the transmission bird flu.

Food safety experts, including Dr. Jean Weese, an Extension food scientist and Auburn University professor of nutrition and food science, stress that the likelihood of a U.S. consumer contracting avian flu from an infected bird is infinitesimally small.

For one thing, she says, there has been no recorded outbreak of the deadly form of avian flu found in Asia and parts of Europe, H5N1, in the United States.

In addition, safeguards already in place to protect Americans from the deadly H5N1 strain have been stepped up following heightened public concerns about the flu’s spread in other parts of the world. The U.S. government has increased its biosecurity educational efforts abroad and also plans to test migratory birds from Asia. Just as they have for humans, U.S. health authorities are also stockpiling avian flu vaccines for poultry in the event of an H5N1 outbreak.

Commercial birds also are routinely tested both at the farm and processing. While no avian or human case of the H5N1 strain has been detected in the United States, an outbreak of another type of avian flu, H5N2, occurred among Pennsylvania chickens in 1983 and among Texas chickens in 2004. Health officials stress, however, that the strain did not spread to humans. Most of the routine bird flu that occurs year after year is not very contagious and does not cause outbreaks among humans, they say.

Weese and other food safety experts also stress that no case of avian flu in humans has ever occurred from eating a cooked bird. In fact, experts believe the disease is spread from direct human contact with live birds, from exposure to infected saliva or feces.

Posted by Jim Langcuster at November 11, 2005 04:14 PM | TrackBack