email received March 10 2006
MaryChris Ashton gave your mailing-address to me, and told me that you might or could publish the following text onto your homepage.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dear Friends
If you could publish it, it would be a great help to us in Germany.I found a eyewitness living on Rügen, who wanted to tell me more about the culling. But he didn't tell me much. We still don't know for sure, how many animals have been culled on Rügen-island.
It seems that poultry breeders there are still in fear of losing their animals. Itīs like 2003 when we had H7N7 in Germany.
Meanwhile we have counts of 170 infected wildbirds in 6 German counties and three infected dead cats on Rügen. One cat definitely had the H5N1 Asian type, the others only H5N1 which type will be officially confirmed in the next few days. Because of that, inside the risk zones, cats have to be kept inside. If you donīt keep them inside, you risk (at Niedersachsen and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern) your cat being shot dead. Or you have to pay a fine. This penning-in of cats lasts 30 days. The "farming poultry associations" are behind this measure. They say that this is necessary, because cats could transport the virus onto farms.
Yesterday, Minister Seehofer said on Bavarian TV that penning-in and wildbird monitoring are the only measures which make sense to prevent AI coming into domestic poultry stocks. He negated once again the possibility of vaccination for us, until the German vaccine is ready.
On the other side, people who want to vaccinate poultry are becoming more and more determined. I think this is a really positive sign. Also, there are more and more ornithologists and virologists who tell the press, that AI might have reached Germany a long time ago, but wasnīt detected until the swans on Rügen. The disposition all over Germany changes more and more in our direction. This maybe is influenced by the fact that three counties want to change the ban of keeping chickens inside cages. They want to allow the keeping of chickens inside "small-aviaries.
The petition against culling is getting more and more support and the text on the website has been translated into some foreign languages: http://www.gegenpropaganda.org/html/h5n1_uebersetzungen.php
--------------------------------------------------------------- Best wishes,
A