NoNAIS.org

At last Wednesday’s House Agriculture Committee Hearing Ag. Commissioner Steve Kerr stated that Mad Cow Disease (BSE) was no longer the justification for NAIS and Premise ID. He said that their new justification is Avian Bird Flu (H5N1). It is enough to make your head spin with the rate that the government agencies change their reason for invading our privacy and lives with the National Animal Identification System (NAIS). At the hearing Kerr tried to use scare tactics claiming that Bird Flu was a clear and imminent threat that justifies putting through his draconian “to the backyard” version of Premise ID without proper legislative process or public input. This report is just in about an article published in Nature refutes Kerr’s claims:

Two groups of researchers, in Japan and in Holland, say they have discovered why the avian flu virus is rarely if ever transmitted from one person to another.

The reason, the researchers propose, is that the cells bearing the type of receptor the avian virus is known to favor are clustered in the deepest branches of the human respiratory tract, keeping it from spreading by coughs and sneezes. Human flu viruses typically infect cells in the upper respiratory tract.

The avian virus would need to accumulate many mutations in its genetic material before it could become a pandemic strain, said Yoshihiro Kawaoka, a virologist at the University of Tokyo and the University of Wisconsin.

According to a University of Wisconsin news release approved by Dr. Kawaoka, “The finding suggests that scientists and public health agencies worldwide may have more time to prepare for an eventual pandemic.” -New York Times

An odd thing about Kerr’s testimony was that he also stated that the threat from bird flu is not from wild birds but from human travelers who come from foreign lands and will bring a human version of H5N1 back with them. If this is the case then Premise ID is going to be a useless, time consuming waste of money. We don’t need to be tracking where the chickens are - we need to have better health screening for travelers. What we really need is better honesty screening on our bureaucrats like Kerr who seem to have forgotten about the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.