Britain faces up to bird flu

Regarding the accusations, Scotland’s chief vet Charles Milne denied that there were any delays, saying that proper procedures were followed and the “timeline” could not have been tighter. He added; “We got the results at the earliest opportunity.”

The dead swan was found at Cellardyke on Wednesday 29 March but was not removed until the next day. It arrived in Surrey at a lab belonging to the Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) on Friday 31 March. No work was done on it over the weekend, so testing only began on Monday 3 April.

A spokesman for Defra said there was nothing to indicate that the swan should take priority over other samples at its lab in Surrey. He added that since 21 February, the lab tested more than 1,000 samples as part of its routine surveillance of the country’s wild bird population. He said that because of the bird’s badly decomposed state, a number of tests had to be done. By Wednesday 5 April, it was confirmed that the swan did carry a highly pathogenic H5 form of avian flu but it was not yet known whether it was H5N1. Nevertheless, a three-kilometre protection zone was established around Cellardyke. A surveillance zone of ten kilometres was also established and restrictions placed on the movement of poultry birds, with owners being told to protect them from contact with wild birds. But local poultry farmer Donald Peddie said the first he heard about the dead swan was on television. He added, “I would have expected to be contacted a bit earlier.”

Then came Thursday 6 April and an announcement that the swan did in fact carry the deadly H5N1 form of the bird flu virus. Government vets immediately ordered all free-range birds within three kilometres of where the dead swan was found to be brought indoors. They resisted calls for a nationwide ban on keeping free-range poultry outdoors. Instead, they asked poultry farmers within a 2,500 square-kilometre area of Cellardyke (an area about half the size of Trinidad, I think) to voluntarily bring their birds under cover wherever possible. The area concerned contains 3.1 million poultry birds of which 260,000 are free-range.

Health officials have since been trying to calm public fears, saying that the risk to humans was minimal and that it was only possible to catch the virus by close contact with living birds or their droppings. They said the bigger risk was of infected wild birds passing on avian flu to free-range chickens, geese and turkeys.

In a joint statement, the UK and Scottish chief veterinary officers said: “On the basis of a preliminary risk assessment, it has been concluded that a nationwide poultry housing requirement would be disproportionate. We are urgently considering whether there is a need for any regional measures in addition to those already in place.”

As a further safety measure, restaurants have been told to stop preparing gourmet food consisting of raw eggs and half-cooked poultry. The Food Standards Agency (FSA) is advising the food industry and the public only to serve meat where the juices run clear and eggs that have solid whites.

Advising the population at large, FSA chairwoman Deirdre Hutton said: “If you wish to eat poultry and eggs, you should do so, as long as you follow the normal precautions of cooking them thoroughly. By that, we mean cooking until there are no red juices or, in the case of eggs, cooking until the white is hard.”

She added: “That advice applies to cooking chicken generally, not just because of the possibility of avian flu. People should also not eat raw eggs or use raw eggs in dishes that will not be cooked. Independent experts say that runny yolks could be eaten but the World Health Organisation (WHO) stipulates that both egg white and yolk should be solid.”

In the meantime, poultry farmers all over the country are anticipating falling sales in response to the confirmation of the H5N1 virus in the dead swan. A number of supermarkets have said it is too soon to forecast the impact of the virus but the British Poultry Council said it expected a dip in sales until confidence is recovered. It added that farmers were concerned but calm about the threat to sales. Britain produces 850 million table chickens a year and the poultry industry employs 76,000 people. It is worth three billion pounds a year. The Council’s executive officer Jeremy Blackburn said, “I would be surprised if there wasn’t a slight dip in sales.”

On the political front, Prime Minister Tony Blair has led the pleas for calm, as experts stressed there was virtually no chance of catching the H5N1 virus from birds or through eating chickens or eggs. Mr Blair said, “This is not a human to human virus. It is only if humans are in direct and very intensive contact with poultry that there is any risk involved.” Scotland’s chief medical officer Harry Burns has said, “I’ll be eating chicken tonight. In properly cooked meat, the virus is killed.” The major fear among experts is that H5N1 could eventually combine with human flu and mutate into a version that can spread between people.

Coincidentally, the virus claimed its 109th human victim worldwide on Thursday when a girl of 16 died in Egypt. But most of the human deaths since the current outbreak began in 2003 have occurred in the Far East. However, that is no reason for the rest of us to be complacent.