Diseases to keep an eye on.

 ScottAdams (Dilbert) comments about recent reports that Measles is capable of wiping out immunity for other diseases and wonders if Covid might do the same thing.

Uh, Scott Scott Scott: the effect of measles on the immune system has been known for years:

A JAMA article in 1932 noted that children with measles often had their latent Tuberculosis become active. And when I worked in Africa 40 years  we knew this: Often the kids who didn't die of measles would develop TB or croup/RSV a couple of weeks later. Indeed, a recent article in Nature wrote about this in 2019  

In the podcast, he discusses long covid and wonders if this is also associated with immune problems, but mainly he wonders how common is long covid, where people are weak, tired, and have various symptoms that interfere with their ability to work. 

But actually a lot of diseases do this: the problem of  mononucleosis causing severe fatigue in college students is well known. And I've seen it after viral/mycoplasm pneumonia. And now there are reports from India about a similar problem after having Dengue.

So is my lack of energy due to lazyness, or long Dengue?

By the way: There is a huge Dengue epidemic in Asia going on right now. But it is being ignored in the western press because most people don't die of it, and it is not spreading so far to the west. 

Yes, there is a vaccine for Dengue but it has potential lethal side effects, something that the Philippines learned about only after they were used as guinea pigs to test the vaccine. And no one wants to publicize this embarassing episode for fear of making people distrust vaccines that actually save lives. We saw this in the Philippines, where parents hearing about the problem refused to get their kids routine immunizations, so kids died of measles and other diseases that routine baby shots prevent.

Sigh.

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If you liked Covid, you'll love the next "we are all gonna die" epidemic:

Bird flu is resulting in the death of millions of chickens and other birds, but Nature magazine notes it now is spreading mink to mink at a farm in Spain and the problem is that minks are mammals. What happened?

Genetic sequencing showed that the animals were infected with a new variant of H5N1, which includes genetic material from a strain found in gulls, as well as a genetic change known to increase the ability of some animal-flu viruses to reproduce in mammals. The new variant puts bird flu in “uncharted territory”, says Wendy Puryear, a virologist at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. Researchers have warned that, without careful precautions, the disease might eventually spread among people.

That should worry you because there are suggestions that the 1918 influenza epidemic that killed an estimated 50 million people was a form of bird flu. 

It's only a matter of time until these mutations, which occur spontaneously in nature, mutate enough to make human sick.

Which is why a couple years ago there was a lot of hysteria and plans by the public health types learn about the virus.

So scientists are working hard investigating the bird flu virus to find out what happened and why. And they are also doing research into the virus, saying that they plan to find an attenuated version of the virus for a human vaccine.

Good for them. Except: UH OH:

the same scientists who still insist that covid came from nature, not a lab leak, (and condemning you if you dare to suggest otherwise), are now on record defending bird flu manipulations. To save live of course.

Houston Public media Jan 27, 2023;

The government really has a strong interest on behalf of all of us, in the public, in knowing when researchers want to make a virus more lethal or more transmissible, and understanding how that would be done and why that would be done, and whether the benefits are worth it," says Tom Inglesby, director of the Center for Health Security at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Oh, but scientists would never manipulate bird flu to make it more transmissable to humans, so why worry.

Except they already have.

...in 2011, there was an outcry after government-funded researchers altered a bird flu virus that can be deadly in people. Their lab work made this virus more contagious in the lab animals that are stand-ins for people.

italics mine. 

Critics said they'd created a super flu. Proponents said that viruses sometimes have to be manipulated in the lab to see what they might be capable of; in nature, after all, mutations occur all the time and that is how pandemic strains emerge.

and these same scientists are annoyed that the US Government dares to try to stop them from similar experiments in the future. 

...Ron Fouchier, the virologist at Erasmus University Medical Center in the Netherlands, whose lab did the bird flu experiments over a decade ago, said in an email that he'd hoped the experience of going through a pandemic would simulate more research, not "unnecessarily delay or restrict it."

why? Because SCIENCE. 

"I am avidly, absolutely pro-science and pro-research, and in particular pro-infectious disease research," says Inglesby. 

But he says there's a very small part of that research "where there is the potential for very high risk if things go wrong, either by accident or on purpose. And so we have to get the balance right, between the risks that could unfold and the potential benefits."

update: The Houston NPR article has been edited yesterday, but the original one can still be found on Miami NPR:

 

this video is from 8 years ago: 

Murphy's law says that if anything can go wrong, it will.

And lab accidents releasing pathogens are so common that there is a Wikipedia page about it. 

Captain Trips call your office. They are at it again.

--------------------

update: The original article is HERE.

If you have a scientific background you might want to read the whole thing. 

Virology under the Microscope—a Call for Rational Discourse

translation: IF you question our positionn, you are irrational.

But they do list a lot of success stories by similar research.

The problem? Few of these examples were gain of function research that mutated viruses to make them more lethal or more easily transmissable. Much of the examples are about making the viruses weaker, or how to use viruses to enhance the immune response for vaccines (as was done for the British AZ vaccine and some of the Ebola vaccines).

Chicken trivia

 we used to farm broiler chickens, until a typhoon flattened the chicken houses and we decided the profit we made wasn't enough to rebuild (our local chicken prices were low thanks to imports from Viet Nam... globalization anyone?)

Well, anyway, the story of how chickens took over the world as a cheap protein source is fascinating:

So where did the chicken originate? From the forest chicken of South East Asia. or maybe China or maybe India. aka the red junglefowl.

And the original chickens might have been caught to use for cockfighting: something I sort of believe, because cockfighting is a big sport here in the Philippines, where you frequently see fighting cocks outside under a small shelter in people's back yards.

However, along the way, the species was bred to become nicer (although they are still aggressive: You ever heard the Phrase "Pecking order"?) Chickens killing other chickens in a herd is alas a problem, which is why more sophisticated henhouses put hens inside a box to lay eggs and the broiler chickens bred for meat production tend to be a white chicken bred for fast growth and lack of aggression.

Heh. Wikipedia even has an article on the white broiler chicken.

blame Col Sanders and his clones.

The fighting rooster is revered as a symbol of courage, and watchfulnees/ protection here in Asia. Remember how the critics laughed at the "Trump Chicken" meme? Well, it had the opposite connotation here in Asia, especially since the meme was not a Chicken but a fire rooster of the Chinese zodiac.

A charismatic man has a stunning energy, is always in the spotlight. Leader, unquestioned authority, charming handsome - all this Fire Rooster.

There are a lot of species of chickens out there but as I noted, most of the cheaper farmed chickens are of one species.

One worry about the chicken is that this monoculture could lead to it's demise from disease: so scientists are doing lots of DNA studies to identify the chicken origin and maybe to steal some of their genes to improve disease resistance.

The problem? Chickens cross breed, so in many areas, thanks to free range chickens in villages, there are few pure bred red junglefowl out there.

which brings me to the Chicken trivia of the day.

From Nature org blog:

Curiously, one of the few remaining populations of pure red junglefowl, as reported in Audubon, is found in Georgia. About 900 junglefowl roam the streets of the town of Fitzgerald....In the 1960s, wildlife managers released the junglefowl as part of an effort to establish populations of non-native gamebirds for hunting purposes.The junglefowl never established in wild habitats, but they did colonize the Fitzgerald’s parks and backyards, where many local residents consider them a nuisance.

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in a somewhat related item: 

Before there was Green acres, there was the Egg and I: about a city gal whose husband fell in love with country living.

And the Desert will Bloom

 

one valuable source of natural fertilizer is pigeon dung, and you have the additional benefits of the pigeons eating weeds/bugs, and of course, supplying meat for a tasty meal.

the podcast is about the pigeon houses used to fertilize crops in the Negev.

EgyptToday has an article about Pigeon towers, found near fields to house the pigeons and keep their nests safe from predators:

Green seen with pigeon Towers – Mahmoud Hawary

Pigeon towers are unique icons and beautifully shaped, made with all natural materials and a design that allows fresh air to blow through.

Pigeon owners often allow their birds to fly around through the fields. Aside from being bred for consumption, pigeons are also raised as pets. They are really beautiful birds that have a special voice, wisdom and family structure. Pigeons are extremely peaceful and raise their young together.

Notech has an article about the use of pigeon dung for fertilizer in medieval Iran, and notes it could be used today as an alternative to petroleum based fertilizer. They go into more details than the previous article.

Persian pigeon towers are one of the more elegant solutions to the nitrogen-phosphorus problem. These are essentially castles built for thousands of wild pigeons, strategically placed in the middle of the fields. Their droppings were shoveled up once a year and sold to nearby farmers.

Amusing planet has more beautiful photos here.

and moderns "discovering" traditional fertilizers are not just noticing chickens, geese, ducks and pigeons.

 This Article in a Japanese paper on how garbage is "greening" the Sahel in Niger, uses the word "rubbish", but Japan had a long tradition of using night soil for fertilizer, so locals know this is a euphemism.

David Warren, who has a south Asian upbringing, a few days ago linked to a BBC article about ducks in rice paddies, and reminisces about using ducks in rice fields.

There are pretty pictures of the now duckherd farmer, leading his flock through his paddies. The more paddy, the better for the ducks; the more ducks, the better for the paddy. God is bountiful.

The ducks, you see, do not like rice. They eat everything else while the rice grows, at all of its stages: weeds, insects, and many wee creatures which the moderns would restrain by truckloads of pesticides. They also replace the fertilizer truckloads, having been designed by nature to distribute their wealth evenly and lightly. This saves the expense of fuel, in a waste of heavy engineering.

Yes, we still do this: it is only news for foreigners who "discover" what everyone knows here in the countryside.

Not just ducks but quails, for eggs.

One local delicacy are duck eggs (usually pickled in brine, dyed red so you know they are not fresh). Lolo loved them.

And of course, duck supply the local delicacy Balut,

why would anyone eat them? Dirty little secret: they are known for it's aphrodesiac properties.

what brought this up?

Last night, Kuya was negotiating with a local chicken farmer  to buy his chicken manure.

Our fields are being prepared for the main crop that will be planted when the monsoons come in May, and we use the manure as a natural fertilizer for our organic rice.

 We have chicken houses in our area, mainly for friers, but alas the profit is not good, since imported chicken from VietNam is cheaper due to lower wages there.

we once had chicken houses on our farm, on a high area that was too high to grow crops, until a typhoon a couple years ago flattened the area, and we never rebuilt them.

But our neighbors, whose houses survived the typhoon, still "grow" chickens and supply us with the manure.

Happy year of the Rooster

It's Chinese new year. we don't celebrate it here in the provinces, but they do in Manila.

AlJ article has a lot of photos from around the world.

And it's the year of the Rooster: not just the rooster but the Fire Rooster, which is good for the stock market (at least in Hong Kong).

the WAPO has an article about one year of the rooster delicacy: Phoenix claws.

Aka chicken feet.




Yeah, the local street vendors  sell these
but they grill them and apply hot sauce while they were cooking.


And the history of chickens is being rewritten as DNA studies are investigating how chickens domestication spread from SEAsia...from the wild fowl there.

the fire rooster is not a sweet cuddly hen: Think fighting cock.

The Year of the Fire Rooster may be more akin to an American action-adventure film than a martial arts piece, however, with giant rooster balloons now appearing that may bear an uncanny resemblance to new US President Donald Trump.

and here is a short film about the chicken exhibition in Manila Zoo.

Chicken news of the day

Korea just killed 22 million chickens  and other poultry to stop an epidemic of bird flu,

The outbreak, the first in nearly seven months, has been caused by the highly pathogenic H5N6 strain of bird flu, a new type of virus that was first detected in South Korea.

 and now a report at PhysOrg says Iran is doing the same thing

More than 1,000 wild birds, mostly geese, have been found dead in the Mighan wetland in central Iran, the environmental protection organisation told state news agency IRNA on Monday. IRNA said 63,000 chickens, along with 800,000 fertilised eggs and day-old chicks, were culled at a farm in Qazvin province in recent days after an outbreak of the deadly H1N8 and H1N5 strains of the disease. That adds to the 725,000 birds destroyed since mid-November

there have also been outbreaks of at least two strains of birdflu in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. OIE report and map:

the Poultrysite has this page on Chinese outbreaks.

and there are reports that three humans have caught bird flu in China. which is a worry:

The last major bird flu outbreak in mainland China in 2013 killed 36 people and caused about $6.5 billion in losses to the agriculture sector. Delegations from Japan, South Korea and China gathered in Beijing last week for a symposium on preventing and controlling bird flu and other diseases in East Asia, according to China's agriculture ministry website.

we usually don't have problems since we are off the map for migrating birds, but we did have a man die here in 2015 from birdflu caught in China.


the trend for yuppies for back yard chickens might be dangerous if they catch it from a passing bird.

the backyard urban chickens in Asia, often fighting cocks, were forbidden in Jakarta a few years ago after an outbreak. Most human cases of bird flu are from direct contact with the birds.

But the reason for culling is chickenhouses allow an infected bird to spread the disease to the entire flock.

The yuppie animal lovers are aghast at how chickens are factory farmed, but the result is that the poor in the third world can now afford to eat chickens and eggs.

We used to do chicken raising but our chicken houses were flattened by a typhoon a couple years ago and we did not rebuild, since the profit was minimal thanks to cheap imports from Vietnam etc. Luckily, the typhoon hit between "grows" so we didn't have a couple thousand chickens to bury.

But the birdflu is an economic hit to the farmers involved in the industry.

And of course, the real worry is if the flu won't stop at chicken to human, but evolve to human human transmission.

TIME article from 2014 about this. NPR discussion from 2014 here.

why worry? Because some think that the terrible 1918 influenza pandemic was a type of bird flu, and that killed 50 million people, more people than were killed in the first world war.

This is Engineer Hamid, who runs a chicken farm and teaches poultry raising in Iran..

.

Bird Flu

there is an ongoing epidemic of bird flu in Europe. Brought in by migrating birds and spreading into poultry farms etc. This means you have to kill the infected birds to stop the epidemic.

Infected ducks in the Netherlands:

 Tests indicated that the birds were killed by an H5N8 variant of the disease "which is highly infectuous" for poultry—killing about 30 percent of infected birds—but not "very dangerous to humans", public newscaster NOS said. Earlier this month the Netherlands shuttered petting zoos and banned duck hunting as it stepped up measures to stem a bird flu outbreak blamed for killing scores of poultry and more than a thousand wild birds in the country. Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2016-11-dutch-ducks-bird-flu-outbreak.html#jCp

Sweden killed 200 thousand hens. 

The agriculture department stressed that there is no danger of eating eggs from the farm—or Swedish poultry products in general—as the H5N8 virus has never been transmitted from birds to humans. The H5N8 virus has been detected in poultry and wild birds in 10 European countries, according to the World Health Organization: Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Austria, Croatia, Hungary, the Netherlands, Poland, Switzerland and Russia. Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2016-11-sweden-slaughters-hens-bird-flu.html#jCp

Poultry news reports on outbreakes in Hungary and lower Saxony.

more HERE.

more news at PoultrySite (Israel, Indian bird sanctuary related cases, SouthAfrican ostriches, Taiwan, Laos)

Avian Influenza (Fowl Plague) is a potentially devastating disease, predominantly of chickens and turkeys, although the virus can also affect game birds (pheasants, partridge and quail), ratites (ostrich and emu), psittacine and passerine birds. Avian Influenza is caused by an orthomyxovirus, or influenza virus and can survive for considerable lengths of time outside of the host and birds are infected through contact with other birds, mechanical vectors such as vehicles and equipment and personnel travelling between farms, markets and abattoirs.

This is bad news for the farmers.

The ood news: The strain of bird flu hasn't spread to any humans yet, unlike other strains in previous epidemics. LINK

Viking Chickens

No, I am not joking.

Viking chickens.

Viking chickens are a breed of chicken from Iceland. These chickens were brought to Iceland by the Vikings in the 9th century AD and were found on most farms for centuries. Indeed, one of their Icelandic names -- Íslenska landnámshænan -- means "Icelandic hen of the settlers." With the advent of the commercial type chickens, by the 1950s the Icelandic breed was nearly extinct. All the birds now existing (less than 3,000) are descended from a very small group of fowl saved in the 1970s. 

Don't kiss that chick

http://www.savagechickens.com/2007/02/kiss-me.html

The CDC has issued an alert: Do NOT kiss your pet chicken..

 According to the CDC's research, 13% of the chicken-related salmonella cases they studied from 1990 to 2014 were due, in part, to some human-on-chicken smooching. Of the cases they studied, the CDC says, "Most contact occurred at the patients' home, and high-risk behaviors included keeping poultry inside the house and having close contact, such as holding, snuggling, or kissing poultry."

headsup Dustbury

Chickens? Why not?

AnnAlthouse links to a post about Bill Gates promoting chickens in Africa.

My comment (since most of her comments are from the clueless):

Let me give you some background.

40 years ago, I worked in rural Africa as a doc, and we had a nutrition village to feed up malnourished kids and teach moms to supplement their diets. Part of the outreach was selling baby chicks...

Local chickens were mean, laid eggs in the bushes, and had few eggs. We imported hybrid chickens, to be kept in a cage so the eggs didn't get broken by predators. One egg a day would keep the 3 year old from dying of kwashiorkor. And we gave classes how to do this.

We got our funds from Oxfam.

He is funding something that will help, as long as the money goes to organizations that already do this work.

One problem: In Asia, backyard chickens have been banned due to Birdflu. Other "backyard" protein sources include rabbits (which we also used) or Cuys, aka guinea pigs, which a Colombian charity is promoting in the Congo. These are raised indoors as a protein source in the Andes.

Chicken post of the day

from ImprobableResearch:

“A preliminary investigation of piezoelectric effects in chicken feathers,” W. Van Dam, J.A. Tanner, and C. Romero-Sierra,IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, vol. 17, no. 1, 1970, pp. 71-71. The authors explain:
“Piezoelectric effects have been measured experimentally in chicken feathers. Quill sections subjected to alternating electric stress respond with an axial twisting motion that has a well-defined resonant mode. Conversely, subjecting the quill to mechanical stress produced an electrical signal.”

so how can this be used?

For circuit boards maybe...

Wool arranged a collaboration in which Tyson would provide waste feathers for experimentation. Tyson washed the feathers and stripped the quill material away, leaving behind the air-filled down, which the company pressed into thin mats.Wool coated the keratin fiber mats with two different commercial soybean oil preparations in several different proportions. The resulting boards were tested for qualities including rigidity and wetting (the fibers must be saturated by the soybean resin to achieve the desired dielectric constant), as well as vibration damping and thermal expansion, physical performance attributes important in applications including electronic, automotive, aerospace, defense, and farming equipment.

 ModernFarmer has an article on more ways to use the feathers:

The list of things that the keratin-rich material has been used to make is vast: dishes and furniture, clothing, circuit boards, wall insulation, filters and planting pots (the feathers of one chicken makes three one-gallon containers). Feathers are used to make hurricane-proof roofing, shoe soles, and lightweight auto dashboards and glove compartments leading to fuel efficiency. While most are still prototypes, Schmidt says a “handful” of patents have been licensed by research institutes.

Headlines below the fold

BBC article on using Carbon 14 to date the earliest copy of the Koran...

handwriting experts dispute the early date.

But the article goes on to explore more problems with the technique, and the controversies (imaginary or real, from Atlantis to the shroud to the Dead sea scrolls) that are associated with these problems.

the problem? The amount of Carbon 14 in the atmosphere varies from year to year...

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PJO'Rourke's bbc essay on the US election.
Heh. I'm old enough to remember when he wrote for the Rolling Stone.
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Mexico has a huge problem with obesity (no pun intended) and the BBC blames cocacola and other sugar laden drinks.

Myself, I would point out that most Mexicans are Metziso, and that Native Americans also have a high rate of obesity and diabetes. So is it the sugary drinks, or that they no longer risk starvation?

The Pima study, comparing the traditional lifestyles vs the modern diet, shows yes, modern food and having enough of it to eat, does make one obese...but the Mexican tribe living the traditional lifestyle also is shorter and I suspect are poorly nourished.

Ravussin also points out the Pima predisposition to store fat efficiently due to survival mechanisms evolved in the harsh southwestern desert. Read more at http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/article/mexico-vs.-arizona-pima-indians-3258

except this doesn't explain the similarly high rate of diabetes in the Chippewa of northern Minnesota, who are traditional farmers and fishermen in a non desert environment.

The clue indeed might be genetic: That the gene for metabolic syndrome predisposes one to live through famines. But famines occur everywhere, but until modern times, the ability of the poorer classes to get enough to eat was not present in all the world. Now they can, so the ones with the gene for metabolic syndrome get fat.

My mom tells the story of one of our aunts, who lived through the post WWI famines of Austria by eating tree bark and wild foods. When the aunt visited home in the 1930's, she came back and said there was going to be another war...you see, the peasants sensed the war was coming, and were deliberately getting fat so they could survive.

and, of course, not doing heavy physical work of walking long distances is part of the problem.

Wikipedia list of severe famines...

--------------------
strategypage has another backstory on the Sunni Shitte problem of the middle east...
Of course, the problem predates Islam: It goes back to the good old days of Darius the Great.

--------------------

Flash floods in Saudi Arabia.

38mm of rain doesn't sound like much but when the hard desert soil doesn't absorb water, disaster can follow (as those of us who lived in the deserts of NM and Arizona are well aware).

wikipedia article on the 2009 floods there gives some geological background on the area.

------------------------

Few soldiers were killed in Gulf War I, but the toll of that war continue, made worse by the inabilty to find a cause of many of the vagues symptoms of "Gulf War Syndrome".

blaming it on PTSS and other pschological reasons let the experts refuse to admit it was probably related to Sarin and other WMD.
pdf
:http://www.bu.edu/sph/files/2014/04/RAC2014.pdf

or possibly an autoimmue problem after exposure.. the syndrome of toxin induced autoimmune disease is similar to GWS, and this article goes into the physiology:
pdf LINK

Attention conspiracy theorists: it mentions the Garasil problems in the article...

friends of mine who went to that war remember hearing the nerve gas alarms going off during SCUD attacks, but then being told they were false alarms.  The suspicion is that the dose wasn't enough to kill them, but the small doses induced long term autoimmune probblems.

luckily fr r me, female problems requiring surgery and obesity causing hormones made me overweight so I resigned the year before the war...

they were epecting 40 thousand casualties from that war, because of the nerve gas. What probably stopped major use of Sarin was that Dan Quale "made a mistake" and mentioned in public that there were plans to Nuke Baghdad if nerve gas was used.

But of course, small amounts of sarin in the scuds also should have caused similar syndrome in Israelis...and the Kurds, who got major nerve gas attacks, also had evidence of neurological sequella.
------------------------
well, DUHHHH...

Higher nurse to patient ratios result in fewer deaths.

or you could just cut the amount of paper work they do to please the bureaucrats.

----------------
and the most important research article of the day, from Improbable research:

the history of of trained dancing chickens.

In 1941, Skinner, the highly-influential behavioral scientist and father of operant conditioning, began working on Project Pigeon, a classified effort to train pigeons to help guide glide bombs for the Navy, with funding from General Mills, Inc. ...While the Pigeon Project never took off, the Brelands saw the money-making potential of using positive reinforcement to train animals. They bought a small farm in Mound, Minnesota, and began training various animals in their barn. Their company, Animal Behavior Enterprises (ABE), launched in 1943 and among their clients was General Mills. The couple put together a trained chicken show for the company’s farm-feed division, Larro Feed, and trained Larro salespeople on their techniques. The shows were seen at feed stores across the country and were a hit.

Chicken post of the day

So who brought the chickens? ViaNatGeo

DNA showed that the chicken bones in South America dated before the Spanish arrived.

and then there is the question of how the Polynesians got sweet potatoes.

TechTimes article about these migrations



The real question is how the DNA of Australian aborigenes got into the DNA of South American Indians.

via Archeoblog

Chicken item of the day

Kobi Levi's latest pair of high heels were inspired by chickens and cockrels 
Picture: Kobi Levi/ Solent News Photo Agency

Altogether now:

Chicken Shoes: They're EVERYWHERE they're EVERYWHERE...

An Olympics for the rest of us

more cartoons HERE

Chicken post of the day

This is the Dorking Cock:

this is the Dorking Cock on steroids

Dave Barry explains:

For their part, the cyclists continued on a course that covered 156 miles, traveling through the English countryside and towns south of London, including the town of Dorking, which is home to the world-famous Dorking Cockerel. In case you are unfamiliar with the world-famous Dorking Cockerel: It is a 10-foot-high sculpture of a chicken that was erected in a major Dorking roundabout as a way of expressing the theme: “Dorking — We Have a Really Big Chicken.”
The Dorking Cockerel has gotten into the Olympic spirit: Recently, a huge gold medal was placed around its neck by a group of guerilla knitters. I swear I am not making this up. According to the local newspaper, which is named the Dorking and Leatherhead Advertiser, the medal was created and hung on the cockerel by “the Knit ’n’ Knatter group, which meets regularly at the Fluff-a-Torium shop in West Street.” This is the same group, the paper said, that “previously claimed responsibility for the colourful scarves placed on the statue for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations.”

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/07/29/2917545/dave-barry-tight-shorts-cycling.html#storylink=cpy

and FYI: The Cock has it's own facebook page, just in case you want to "friend" it.

Chicken News of the day

from Eng.Hamid, who is a chicken breeder.

------------------------------
I hope he is okay: this report from an Iranian blog, says they have such a chicken shortage and inflation in chicken prices that

Against a backdrop of lengthening food queues, Esmail Ahmadi-Moghaddam, the head of Iran's law enforcement forces, has warned that films depicting scenes of chicken dinners could provoke the underprivileged classes to attack the rich.

the article includes this editorial cartoon:

I moved the rant to BNN ...

Gift Item of the Day

Your very own Chicken Foot Stool.
 it comes in various colors to go along with your decor...

 Buy it from the citygirlfarm.

headsup Notcot

Musical interlude of the day

Chicken news

I had posted about C.Dif enteritis and that they were treating it with fecal transplants, but I noted probiotics were being used also to prevent folks from getting it.

Well, it appears to work in chickens. LINK

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in other chicken news: the Japanese earthquake last year resulted in the death of 4.37 million chickens because the docks were destroyed and they couldn't import enough chicken feed.

they are mainly raised for their eggs.

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Geek joke of the week

from an email of Eng Hamid