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As bird flu spreads, restaurants serving chicken and ducks have lost all customers. At the 371 restaurants in Korea that serve chicken, consumption fell from 13,356 chickens on April 1 to just 3,339 by May 12. That's down to just a quarter of previous consumption levels. Restaurants are about to put up signs saying they do not use eggs in their food.
City residents are running away from pigeons. In Yongcheon, North Gyeongsang Province, where bird flu was detected, a provincial sporting event was postponed amid worries over possible human infections. At this rate, fears of avian influenza may escalate to levels we are seeing now with the groundless rumors about mad cow disease.
Since 2003, 382 people in 14 countries have been infected with bird flu and 241 of them have died. Most of those infections took place in environments where people lived practically right next to infected poultry, inhaling particles from feathers and dust. In Korea, some 500,000 people are poultry farmers, with 180,000 households raising chickens and 1,000 households raising ducks. But there has yet to be a single case of a human being infected with bird flu here.
Chickens suffering from the virus die after their skin turns dark red, so they cannot be plucked and brought to markets to be sold. Infected chickens cannot lay eggs, so there is no need to worry about infected eggs. Around the world, the only instances of bird flu being transmitted to fowl other than chickens or ducks are infections involving pigeons in Thailand and wild swans in Russia and Japan. None of those instances led to human infections. Still, it is advisable to avoid unnecessary contact with wild fowl, as well as with the waste from chickens and ducks. Another sanitary precaution is to wash one's hands frequently.
We are living in a multimedia society where information is shared among 35 million Internet users and 40 million with mobile phones. Once faulty information begins to circulate it's only a matter of time before it gets amplified by a hundred and even a thousand times. When the groundless fears over mad cow disease were spreading, the government's failure to take note of the multiple channels of information exchange allowed the situation to escalate. The government must wake up this time and properly assess which Internet portals, which web site message boards and which on-line clubs are passing groundless rumors around. The government must also disseminate credible information among the public. Public notices should not simply tell people it is safe to consume cooked chicken and duck, but rather inform them what to watch out for and what is okay. This is how to build up trust.
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