Louisa Chu on Eating During the Bird Flu Outbreak

Just ran across this interview with Louisa on WBEZ. It's interesting to learn that Shanghai is cleaned out of poultry now. Also interesting to learn that there are questions about whether the dead pigs in the Shanghai river in early March may be linked in some way to the dead birds in the river found later in March, and whether these birds have anything to do with the bird flu. One wonders what measures will be taken to ensure the safety of meat in the upcoming months.

https://soundcloud.com/wbez-worldview/e ... y-in-china

Thanks Josephine. Yep, I got to Shanghai just as the new bird flu outbreak started. I ended up not only eating chicken, duck, pigeon, and goose, but cooked too, so handled raw poultry. I think the only bird I missed was quail!

Not only did they find about 20 thousand dead pigs floating in the river that supplies the tap water to Shanghai, but dead ducks and swans in other bodies of water too. And no, no poultry, not in the live markets or even frozen at the supermarkets.

This is a great but chilling article by Laurie Garrett, "senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations and a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist."
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2 ... pigs_virus

You can also hear her on BEZ a couple of weeks ago.
https://soundcloud.com/wbez-worldview/p ... -pandemics

Garrett was also a consultant on the film Contagion, which HBO Asia happened to run last week. The week before they ran 12 Monkeys.

I happened to catch it yesterday. Very entertaining and well done.
Really worth a listen.