{"id":171325,"date":"2010-01-12T10:36:27","date_gmt":"2010-01-12T15:36:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.wsj.com\/health\/2010\/01\/12\/poultrys-other-public-health-job-sentinel-chicken\/"},"modified":"2010-01-12T10:36:27","modified_gmt":"2010-01-12T15:36:27","slug":"poultry%e2%80%99s-other-public-health-job-sentinel-chicken","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/171325","title":{"rendered":"Poultry\u2019s Other Public Health Job: Sentinel Chicken"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Chicken\"A story<\/a> in this morning’s WSJ cracks open what one government official calls a “secure system to protect these birds”: Secretive farms, classified as part of the nation’s “critical infrastructure,” where hens lay the hundreds of thousands of eggs needed to make swine-flu vaccine.<\/p>\n

The article put us in mind of another big job for chickens seeking a career in public health: serving as a sentinel bird . It’s a job that requires some sacrifice, as this WSJ story<\/a> suggested back in 2003:<\/p>\n

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\nBraving a burst of clucks and beating wings, a woman in a white Tyvek jumpsuit grabs a red-brown hen by the feet and holds it upside down until the flapping stops. Then she flips the bird over, tucks it between her knees, and pricks the hen’s comb with a tiny lancet, dabbing drops of blood onto a strip of filter paper to be tested for West Nile virus.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Sentinel birds got a lot of ink a few years back, when more than a dozen states established flocks as early warning systems for West Nile virus. See page 12 of these CDC gudelines<\/a> for tips on setting up a sentinel flock.<\/p>\n

Sentinel work isn’t limited to chickens; as Slate noted<\/a> in 2006, flocks of ducks can serve as an early-warning system for the arrival of strains of bird flu.<\/p>\n

Photo: Associated Press<\/em><\/p>\n

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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A story in this morning’s WSJ cracks open what one government official calls a “secure system to protect these birds”: Secretive farms, classified as part of the nation’s “critical infrastructure,” where hens lay the hundreds of thousands of eggs needed to make swine-flu vaccine. The article put us in mind of another big job for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":650,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-171325","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171325","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/650"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=171325"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171325\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=171325"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=171325"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=171325"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}