Monthly Archives: February 2025

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If eggs aren’t available, why can we still buy chicken?

I note this article this week: https://apnews.com/article/usda-firings-doge-bird-flu-trump-fdd6495cbe44c96d471ae8c6cf4dd0a8. That version says that the Trump Administration is trying to rehire bird flu experts that got fired. Most of the news outlets frame it differently: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/doge/usda-accidentally-fired-officials-bird-flu-rehire-rcna192716. Suddenly it is the USDA at fault not the Trump administration’s chainsaw fool.

Should we worry about bird flu? Oh, yes, I think so. I have been wondering why we still have chicken to eat and chicken in the stores, if millions of chickens are being wiped out to try to prevent H5N1 bird influenza from moving into humans. This article explains in unreassuring detail how factory farms, packing chickens together, and killing them at 6 weeks old for meat, puts pressure on the virus to become more deadly and kill the host. In wild birds the influenza virus wants to spread, so it’s better not to kill the host fast. That is not true on our national and international big factory farms.

The Unnatural History of Bird Flu

Firing the people working the track the H5N1 bird influenza and trying to stop it if it starts going human to human, well. Is that injustice or arrogance or stupidity? Or all three? And who wants to work for the government now? It is being treated as a corporation, but it isn’t a corporation. Public service often pays less. Good luck hiring the best and brightest who want to serve our country and humanity.

This is the worst year in the US for influenza since 2017-2018 so far. That is without the H5N1 bird influenza really getting in to people. Here is the graph for the week ending February 15th from the CDC. I keep an eye on it all through influenza season.

The article on H5N1 bird influenza is the best argument I’ve ever read for choosing not to eat meat. I like meat, but the factory farming is going to more countries. It may produce more eggs and more chickens, but if it is also the perfect breeding ground for lethal influenza, that changes my viewpoint. We cannot go on. We will have another pandemic.

Why are humans such fools?

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: injustice.

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Unweighted

Words behind my back
damaging
hurtful
gossip and lies
I forgive
I wait

I wait

I wait, wait, weight

Weighted 13 years
For them to speak to me
Instead of about me
At last waiting makes me angry
I have forgiven
tried to connect
some of them say they love me
this is not love
waiting
weight of hurt and anger

And I let go
of the wait
of the weight

I forgive myself
I am free
I rise
I let them go
they are forgiven
but they may not enter my life
again
not ever

I forgive myself
I am free
I rise

unweighted

________________________

For the Ragtag Daily Prompts: weight and chopper. My heart is what is chopped, and the abandoning friends and family wielded the choppers.

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New scar and whale songs

My receptionist of 6 years at Quimper Family Medicine, Pat McKinney, died on February 6th. The photograph is from October, when I was in Port Townsend again for two weeks. She and I went for a walk. Well, I was walking and she was in a wheelchair. She was in hospice for over a year.

We had fun working together. Pat played music at her desk because the patient rooms were not quite sound proof enough. One day she was playing whale songs. I hear her on the phone with a patient. “The noise? Those are whale songs.” Pause. “Oh, Dr. Ottaway insists on whale songs.” I started laughing, because she was the one that picked them. So much for MY reputation.

When the covid vaccine came out, I got mine as a first responder. A few days later we had a lull between patients. I was standing in the hall near Pat’s desk. I said, “I don’t know why people are fussing about the vaccine, it seems fine to me,” and I gave a big twitch. Pat started laughing. I could set her off all day by twitching at her.

Patricia McKinney, 2/17/1943 – 2/5/2025.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt scars.