Editorials: Finally, perhaps answers

Avian flu has jumped to mammals. More dairy workers are reporting the illness. In California, a major dairy producer, up to a third of the herds may be infected. Pasteurized milk is reported safe to drink but raw milk is not.

“This virus is out of control. It is time for urgent and serious leadership and action to halt further transmission and mutation,” said Rick Bright, a virologist and former head of the U.S. Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, in the Los Angeles Tines. “The concept of letting it burn out through food animals, with unmonitored voluntary testing, has failed. There are pandemic playbooks that we need to dust off and begin to implement.”

So far, responses to the avian flu vary by state. Monitoring differs from California to Colorado. Almost all actions are voluntary. Clearly, that has not been good enough in controlling the spread.

Buena Vista County has been a focal point for avian flu since 2015, when the first outbreak regionally saw millions of chickens and turkeys wasted. All during that time, research dropped off on frozen congressional funding. Finally, nearly 10 years later, the Department of Human Services announced that it is partnering in a research program into all facets of avian flu with the Department of Agriculture. Vaccine stocks for humans will be built up as part of the partnership. Vaccines for livestock remain debatable for commercial reasons — poultry producers have resisted vaccination over export concerns.

The research should examine the extent to which the concentration of livestock fosters pandemics, and the impacts on humans. When you put 5 million chickens under one roof you are inviting trouble. Northwest Iowa is a petri dish with the heaviest concentrations of poultry, dairy cattle and swine right on the migratory waterfowl flyways. Finally, we might get an understanding of how the disease spreads and how to contain it. So far, our main thrust has been biosecurity. We can see how well that has worked in the absence of funding for research and appetite for regulating agri-industry. Avian flu is now human flu. It is deadly. It deserves our full attention, as do the questions of what spawns it.

The spread of disease makes us wonder if our livestock production paradigm is not fatally flawed. It’s a legitimate question when basic human health is put at risk.

Trust the vote

Despite the reckless rhetoric otherwise, rest assured that your voted will be counted accurately and that the November election will be clean. Our county auditors who run elections take the job seriously, as do all the poll workers. They are honest people. In Buena Vista County, there’s a good chance they know who you are. Iowa maintains an impeccable history of clean elections, thanks to them. The rare mistakes that are made are corrected quickly.

Former President Donald Trump continues to claim that he won the 2020 election. It’s a lie, and he is a loser. Election officials and courts threw out every one of his phony allegations. People are suckers. Facts are facts. The vote was clean. Trump lost.

A central part of his fantasy is that hordes of illegal immigrants are voting. Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird found one: a 42-year-old Mexican man living in Marshalltown legally was charged with voting as a non-citizen in a city council election. That is the only case in Iowa that we can recall. One. Thousands of non-citizens live in Storm Lake. They don’t want to screw it up by voting illegally. It will be interesting to hear from the man in Marshalltown about what he was thinking. Things must be bad at city hall.

In the 2016 cycle, some 30 cases were found where non-citizens attempted to vote, out of 23.5 million votes cast, according to a study by the Brennan Center for Justice.

Lying about the voting system to instill cynicism corrodes democracy. The election officials we know are honest and diligent. That is true across the nation. Non-citizens rarely attempt to vote because they prefer Marshalltown to Juarez, and when they do they are found out. You can bet that Attorney General Bird is hawking for attempts at illegal voting. So are poll watchers from both political parties at each voting site.

You can trust the vote. If you can be made to believe otherwise, you are standing in the fertile ground for tyranny. Believe in the system after considering the real facts. It works.