January 08, 2007
So by tamiflu do you mean a fixie? Cuz that would be a lot more effective getting around the dead bird induced traffic than taking an antiviral medication.
BTW, if it actually is bird flu I'm totally going to ship you one of those dead birds. I picked one up today and it's sitting in our lab freezer with your name on it.
My brother and I were debating whether clearing downtown was a reasonable response to finding the dead birds. Keep in mind that besides the commercial costs to downtown enterprises and the intangible costs of public anxiety from what seems to be a false alarm, there were real costs of overhead and operations for emergency and municipal workers to shut down all of downtown. This is money that could have been spent investigating drugs, theft, abuse or even real terrorist threats. Was this an overreaction or prudent crisis management?
If 50 birds suddenly drop dead, I think it should be investigated and that people should be kept away until it is clear that they will not be harmed. It could very easily have been the canary in the coal mine. I don't think that it is reasonable to shut the street down until noon when the brids were discovered at 4am. I think it needed to be investigated, but as soon as they made the conclusion that no one would be harmed, they should have scooped up the birds and moved on. There is no reason it should have taken the money and resources it did, but I don't fault them for initially doing what they did.
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I'm sure this was the result of some dumbfuck company poisoning the birds because both pigeons and grackles roost in large groups. This has happened in the past in front of hospitals and other places that tried to "lightly" poison the birds to keep them out of the area. Unfortunately, the birds got too much poison and it killed many tens of them.
posted by splatnikGanglion at 11:42AM CST on January 08