Harm Kiezebrink, professional poultry exterminator, describes his work fighting bird flu like a tactician surveying a battle scene. "The danger isn't in the dead birds you find, the danger is if you ignore it," he said in an interview in Beijing. "I'm trying to avoid it jumping into the poultry industry."
BEIJING — Harm Kiezebrink, professional poultry exterminator, describes his work fighting bird flu like a tactician surveying a battle scene.
"The danger isn't in the dead birds you find, the danger is if you ignore it," he said in an interview in Beijing. "I'm trying to avoid it jumping into the poultry industry."
As bird flu rippled across parts of the globe, the 47-year-old Dutch businessman has carved an airport-hopping career as one of the world's few experts on killing and handling chickens, ducks and other birds that harbour the deadly H5N1 virus.
Governments and scientists have focused on plans for human vaccines and quarantines if the virus mutates into a strain that spreads between people. But Kiezebrink says an urgent challenge is devising faster, cleaner ways to cull exposed birds so the virus has less chance to spread to people.
"Farmers are faced with a problem they don't know how to deal with. You need a process that is cheap, easy to use and doesn't need experts," he said.
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He hopes his new foam spray method will be make the job safer and within reach of farmers in poor countries. "In my vision, every village will have a kind of fire brigade to kill poultry."
Chicken killing runs in Kiezebrink's family. His father was a chicken-sexer, which involves examining a bird's single opening to determine the sex of young chicks.
Kiezebrink grew up on a chicken farm. Later, his father and brother raised live poultry to feed zoo animals.
An engineer with an MBA, Kiezebrink joined the family business in 1997. Soon after, his father died of influenza 12 days after visiting Indonesia to teach farmers how to sex chickens. Kiezebrink said he believes his father probably died of bird flu, though test results were contradictory.
LIMITING THE RISK
Since then he has devised several devices to kill poultry, including the AED-100, which can electrocute and mince 10,000 chickens in an hour, gassing tanks, and a biodegradable sack that farmers can use to poison and disinfect dozens of birds.
The World Health Organisation and dozens of countries, including Britain, France, Thailand, China and most recently Romania, have sought his advice on killing poultry.
But these methods leave many people exposed to potentially dangerous virus and cost tens of thousands of dollars, putting them out of reach of farmers in poor countries most vulnerable to the disease.
"Culling so many birds involves a lot of people," he said, adding that in an outbreak of the H7 subtype of bird flu virus in Holland in 2003 over 80 people were directly infected -- many involved in culling chickens -- and 8,000 of their relatives and friends also showed contact with the virus.
"If that was H5N1, it would have been the start of a pandemic."
Last year, Kiezebrink advised China on how to best cull poultry and helped to set up local emergency response teams to oversee poultry culling. This time he is back in China to discuss his new foam technique with a potential Chinese manufacturer. In tests, the foam killed a shed of 3,000 birds in two minutes, he said.
On Tuesday, China confirmed two more outbreaks of the disease among poultry in the western region of Xinjiang, raising the country's total outbreaks for this year to 13. China has about 14 billion farm chickens, ducks and geese, and it has promised to vaccinate them all against bird flu.
Kiezebrink said he feels relatively assured about China's regimented response to the disease, and he is much more fearful of a major outbreak in Indonesia or Vietnam setting in chain a human pandemic.
On Monday, Indonesia reported a 20-year-old woman died from the H5N1 virus, and Vietnamese scientists said tests showed the virus could be mutating into more dangerous forms.
To date, the virus is known to have infected 126 people in Asia, killing 64.
"I'm afraid if there's no technique, people will use sticks, and that will only make things worse," said Kiezebrink.
Source: Reuters
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