The risk assessment published yesterday by Defra, but presumably done by APHA, is vaguely interesting but not spectacularly well-informed. It’s not that well-informed because no-one has invested in studying the process of disease transmission of avian flu to, within, or from wild birds. So there is quite a lot of guesswork dressed up as something…
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Bird/poultry flu update
Today I will carefully be reading this, Risk Assessment on the spread of High Pathogenicity Avian Influenza (HPAI) H5N1 to wild birds from released, formerly captive gamebirds in Great Britain: Pheasants (click here), which was rather quietly released by Defra yesterday. My aim is to blog about this by the end of the day, but…
Sunday book review – The Diary of a Secret Tory MP by Anon
This book did make me laugh out loud. And that’s quite an achievement because it attempts to satirise the awfulness of the current bunch of Tories in Westminster whose collective awfulness is almost beyond parody. Almost, but not actually as this author does a great job in exaggerating the behaviour and callousness and making it both…
The inaugural Michael Marks Environmental Poet of the Year Prize
Yesterday evening I attended a poetry award evening in the British Library as one of the three judges of the inaugural Michael Marks Environmental Poet of the Year competition. The winner was Linda France’s collection of poems, Letters to Katlia, as pictured above – and it was good to hear her reading one of her…
Bird flu update
Cases of bird/poultry flu in wild birds in the UK continue to mount and are at a higher level than last year. It hasn’t gone away. Numbers of birds tested as positive: in a previous blog (click here) I compared the number of records of wild birds testing positive for bird flu up to and…