In coming days, KFC will have television commercials ready to reassure customers that its chicken is safe to eat if there is a bird flu outbreak.
The chicken chain said Tuesday it hopes the spots never have to air, but it’s taking no chances in the face of a potential threat to business.
“As our investors would hope, we are being proactive in preparing the materials in the event that we need to use them,” Jonathan Blum, spokesman for KFC’s parent, Yum Brands Inc., said of the spots expected to be shot soon.
“Even if we did have an outbreak, which is unlikely, it’s going to be very limited,” Lobb said. “And the number of birds involved will be very small.”
Currently, the virus is hard for people to catch, and most deaths have been linked to human handling of infected poultry. Vietnam, the country hit hardest by bird flu, on Tuesday reported its 42nd human death. World health experts warn, however, the virus could mutate into a form that’s easily passed from person to person, possibly sparking a global outbreak.
In China, where KFC recently opened its 1,500th restaurant, Yum posted sharply lower sales growth in October. Yum has Pizza Hut restaurants in China, but the bulk of sales come from KFC.
Sales rose by 8 percent in the China division, compared to 24 percent growth a year ago. Blum attributed the slowdown to a disappointing promotion for a crispy chicken steak product.
Industry analyst Larry Miller of Prudential Equity Group also cited the weak product promotion for lower-than-expected China results. But in his response to October sales, he also wrote, “Headlines from the avian flu situation continue to weigh on overall consumer sentiment toward chicken in China.”
Yum, Yum!
No reason to be worried – we don’t use real birds!!!
Don’t know if this is a coincidence but in UK we have recently been getting ads for ‘Beef tonight’ . Well.
Am I the only guy in the world who thinks this Bird Flu thing is hyped beyond belief? Maybe I’m missing the big picture, but it seems to rank with SARS, Mad Cow and Ebola as nasty things that are being whipped into doomsday prophesy. What? 67 people died in an area of the world with several billion? Seems statistically insignificant to me. I’m more worried about getting hit by lightning.
Don, speaking of hype and putting things into perspective, a heterosexual male with three partners a year has a better chance of getting struck by lightening than contacting AIDS.
Don’t worry….at KFC the grease and bread batter keeps the virus at bay.
Actually, you cannot get bird flu from EATING THE DAMN BIRDS.
Let’s promote stupidity.
Don, it’s only because the 1918 crisis was caused by a very similar strain, and bird flu…when it can finally cross to humans, has been pretty deadly to us as people. I think the Hong Kong flu of 68 was a similar strain.
Now, having said that…..to get the big picture try reading about influenza and the great outbreaks, and the basic clinical picture. If this isn’t IT there will be an IT and in your lifetime. The fact that we are so very overdue is one key indicator that it will be bad. We don’t have the immunity. Influenza kills many, many people every year….but these are mostly very young and very old….so you probably don’t really care, or realize it.
As for ebola it isn’t a really efficient bug. It’s a problem because it’s related to funeral ritutals in the area. As for SARS….well, that is still perplexing, but the big outbreaks had a weird transmission (sewer problems, hygiene issues and a very tightly packed housing area). Mad Cow…is completely an issue of bad feed practices, bad fertilizer practices, and ignorance of PRIONS. It’s essentially crappy farming and agriculture stupidity. (And, the quest for ever cheaper meat….from fatter cows, fed steroids and antibiotics…fed feed with excess protein ….with crushed other cows. Not normal cow food. If we could get our heads around the concept of “quality food”…we’d be a lot better off. Less=more. Or, if you want me to spell it out…. more expensive food that TASTES BETTER, supporting good farming practices.)
But, yeah, sooner than later, there WILL BE some bug that wipes out a good portion of us. If the earth can’t get rid of enough of us with hurricanes and tornadoes, earthquakes and mudslides…..she’s going to bring in the heavy artillery….
You can’t get it by eating the birds, simply because the virus is killed at high tempertature, like everything else.
But in East Asian countries where a soup made of raw Ducks blood is served you might, not that you’ll find that on many KFC menus, West or East.
If/Once the avian strain of disease mutates and picks up elements of influenza it could/will spread easily to humans. As it stands, as long as you aren’t farming chickens in Vietnam or drinking bowls full of infected blood you should be fine? So no, you haven’t got an excuse to break out the airgun and start taking out pigeons…yet.
On the bird flu thing, its definitely not “if” but “when”.
Here is generally how it works.
The current bird flu is not transmissible between humans, at least by casual contact. Not all viruses are deadly, but the ‘new’ bird flu is deadly to humans. “Regular” flu is readily transmissible between humans. As long as the two types of flu (avian and regular) do not meet in the same living creature, then the problem is small.
Viruses have tendency to swap genetic code, which is why they evolve (mutate) rather quickly.
Suppose that a person becomes infected with the “bird flu”. If this same person has the ‘regular’ flu at the same time, the likelihood of a genetic exchange between the regular and avian viruses is substantial. More than likely, nothing much will change, but the result could also be a new strain of flu that has the transmissibility of regular flu and the deadliness of avian flu. It is no longer ‘avian’ flu, it is a hybrid (actually a new flu), for which the body has little or no natural defenses, or in the case of avian, is so ‘virulent’, that it reproduces and overwhelms the body at a rate that can not be counteracted by the immune system.
If by the roll of the “god dice”, the new hybrid strain finds a host in a new living creature, the new creature has a ‘pure’ case of the new hybrid flu, and it becomes very contagious, an that becomes the beginning of the epidemic.
No you cannot get a flu by eating chicken. You’d need to kill a sick bird, come in contact with it’s body fluids, and then you could come down with bird flu. Few American’s kill their own dinner, heck, there are some that can’t even COOK a meal for themselves.
It’s not a flu that can transmit between people. Just from bird to bird, and from bird contact to human. Its an animal flu. Yes, animals get the flu. Right now there is a terrible dog flu that came from horses (transpecies). It’s pretty dangerous, and dogs get very sick, some die. Didn’t do much to horses though.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/citation/309/5744/2147a
Virus’ can combine with other virus to create new and more deadly forms, or to create less deadly forms. It’s a crap shoot.
The issue is not so much …..that this might be the bird flu that goes nutty and kills like in 1918, because it may not be “the one”….but that we’ve always had these pandemics….and we’re overdue. The last one was in 1968-ish (Hong Kong Flu). That was a bad one…as I kid I remember being out of school for several weeks, and when I went back the classes were half full. Everyone seemed to get it. Anyway, this whole “gotta get your kid to school” and lack of sick days (and reluctance to take them because you want to save them for extra vacation time) is the real threat. People go to work sick, exchange virus…sooner or later, we will have a killer flu.
I don’t see sales of hand soaps up. that is one of the MOST IMPORTANT thing to pay attention to. Hand-eye-nose contact. You touch something, then wipe your eye…..infection!! You sneeze in your hand (as no one carries handkerchiefs anymore) wipe off, and then shake someone’s hand, you grab the standing support on the bus, go home and make dinner for the family. Germs exist. We invented soap. Use it.
The flu, this year, is no more important than any year. The big pandemic may not happen, but it’s good to consider it, and plan for it. And, after Katrina and FEMA….I’d like to see more governement planning on this and/or any potentially widespread illness.
Thanks for the clarification about eating the chicken. I’m not in the US and we DO have bird flu in this region but not in our country. We have millions of migratory birds here — some of the most in the world — so I assume it is coming.
The trouble with our local papers is that they will write a big article about how consumption of chicken is down for fear of bird flu but they won’t give the specific detail that you can’t get H5N1 that way.