"Avian flu is not anything new to us, we've been dealing with it for years," said Jim Rogers, spokesperson for the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. "If a highly pathogenic strain appears in our poultry population, we move quickly to isolate and eradicate it and we're sharing that expertise with other countries to help them do the same.

"In the U.S. we have some backyard flocks where people raise birds for their own consumption, but we know how to find them and work with them. In Asia they have many more and this poses a problem when a virus needs to be contained."

Alex Bermudez, director of the Veterinary Medical Diagnostic Lab of the University of Missouri at Columbia, agreed.

"Bird flu has been a problem for poultry farmers for a long time. Veterinary labs are continually monitoring for these viruses, even when they aren't an issue from a public health point of view," Bermudez told UPI. "Some viruses aren't very potent. They have become endemic, or a normal part of our biological landscape, and we aren't too worried about them."

But he said H5N1 is a different story.

What makes H5N1 unusual, he explained, is that it is the first recorded avian-flu virus to jump directly from birds to people without fracturing its genetic core. The public health concern is, of course, that the virus will mutate and "host-adapt" so that humans will become carriers and create a flu pandemic.

Bermudez and Rogers described the U.S. process that starts with a vet seeing an ill flock, taking a bird and sending its trachea and a swab from its digestive tract to the National Veterinary Services Lab in Ames, Iowa, and finding out the cause of death.

"The NVSL is our main organization," Bermudez said. "They are the ones who contact our trade partners and make sure the disease doesn't go outside the country."

Once an avian-flu outbreak has been spotted, the USDA moves in, isolates the flock and eradicates it to stop the spread of the disease.

"It's very efficient," said Rogers. "We coped successfully with an outbreak in California in 2004 that was fairly small and another that was widespread in 2001. We know what we're doing and how to get cooperation from both farmers and backyard producers."

Bermudez said that the University of Missouri has sent veterinarians and veterinary students abroad to help with the eradication effort, as have agricultural colleges all across the nation in concert with the USDA.

"We're all willing to do our part to stop this before it starts, and we have the know-how to do so," Bermudez concluded.

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