February 9, 2004

 

 

Asian Countries Ban US Chicken Imports On Bird Flu Fears

 

Several Asian nations banned chicken imports from the U.S. following the discovery of bird flu in Delaware, where 12,000 chickens were slaughtered. Delaware officials said the state's avian-influenza strain, H7, is milder than the H5N1 strain in Asia and doesn't pose a risk to humans.

 

China said yesterday it had newly confirmed cases of bird flu in six provinces. Vietnam and Thailand remain the only two countries where humans have contracted the disease. In Vietnam, 13 people have died, while five deaths have been confirmed in Thailand.

 

Following the announcement Friday of the Delaware outbreak, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia and Singapore temporarily banned imports of U.S. poultry. Hong Kong also has banned U.S. chicken imports, but only from Delaware.

 

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, poultry exports in 2002 totaled $2.28 billion. Of that, about $60 million of exports came from Delaware.

 

The Japanese ban will remain in place until Tokyo officials determine the extent of the U.S. outbreak and whether the flu strain is harmful to humans, an official of Japan's Ministry of Agriculture said Sunday. (Delaware officials said the H7 strain isn't harmful to humans.) Japan already had banned poultry imports from Rhode Island and Connecticut after a bird-flu outbreak in those states last year. Japan last year imported about 50,000 tons of poultry products from the U.S.

 

The Singapore government said it imported about 19,250 tons of frozen chicken meat valued at about $19.5 million from the U.S. last year. Those imports constituted nearly 9% of Singapore's chicken consumption, the government's Agri-Food and Veterinary Authority said Saturday.

 

Also on Saturday, the World Health Organization said tests on two Vietnamese women who died earlier this month showed "both viruses are of avian origin and contain no human-influenza genes," calling the finding "reassuring." The blood of the women was tested because experts suspected they may have caught the disease from their brother, who also died. That hasn't been ruled out yet, but so far there have been no known cases of person-to-person transmission in the bird-flu outbreak.

 

Health experts have been most worried about the possibility of the disease combining with the human-influenza virus to create a more-lethal version that could be spread among people, giving rise to a global pandemic.

 

There have been some fears that the virus could jump to people through another mammals, such as pigs. Friday, concern mounted that some pigs in Vietnam had acquired bird flu after a Vietnam representative of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization said preliminary tests found the virus in the snouts of pigs in Hanoi.

 

But Bui Quang Anh, director of the Veterinary Department of Vietnam's Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, said Saturday that tests showed no such occurrence. "I can formally announce that no bird-flu virus has been found in pigs in Vietnam," he said.

 

Meanwhile, the WHO said it was investigating whether a Cambodian woman who died recently had bird flu, in the country's first suspected human case of the disease.