Nigeria fights bird flu with blunt knives and bare hands

Jeff Koinange:

Bird Flu has hit Nigeria, Africa's most populous nation and the continent's biggest poultry producer, with a vengeance. In one part of the country alone, more than 140,000 chickens have been culled, and that's just the beginning.

In farm after farm we visited for tonight's show, we witnessed disturbing scenes of chickens being slaughtered without proper supervision or equipment, with health officials using blunt knives, without gloves or protective suits, the animals' blood spraying the officials' clothes and bodies.

In some cases, the birds were dumped into pits and set alight. But in others, they were simply tossed into shallow pits and left there to rot in the hot African sun. This, scientists say, poses a problem. Uninformed locals, many of them poor, illiterate and living in remote areas, have been dipping into the pits and coming up with armloads of dead and possibly contaminated chickens. They told us they felt the whole culling exercise was a waste of what they called good meat and that they would take the birds home and cook them for their hungry families.

Health officials fear this could be the beginning of a potential pandemic, as this is one way the bird flu virus can mutate from animals to humans. And in open-air meat markets like one we visited in downtown Kano, chickens continue to be a big seller, with locals telling us they believe bird flu is a myth and that until they see evidence of humans being infected, they won't stop buying and eating chickens.

That may be too late. Although no one in Nigeria has died of bird flu, the virus has already killed more than 90 people around the world. Unfortunately, Nigeria seems to be providing the perfect uncontrolled environment for the H5N1 virus to thrive.

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