May 8, 2006

 

Animal trade biggest threat in bird flu spread

 

 

Trade in animals--both legal and illegal--is a more likely culprit in spreading bird flu than wild migrating birds, some of the world's top wild bird experts said Friday (May 5).

 

Bird flu has spread from Asia throughout Europe and Africa, but it has not yet reached the US.

 

"Wild bird monitoring is important, but the real threat comes from trade in poultry," John Flicker, the National Audubon Society's president, said after a Capitol Hill briefing.

 

Peter Johan Schei, director of Norway's Fridtjof Nansen Institute and chairman of BirdLife International, a global alliance of conservation organisations, said the US and other governments should boost trade protections but not lessen attention to bird migration routes.

 

Schei and Leon Bennun, BirdLife International's science policy director, agreed that illegal poultry imports and those of other animal products pose the most immediate risk.

 

"It does not mean we have to stop monitoring wild birds," Bennun said.

 

Senior Bush administration officials have said they, too, worry about the bird flu arriving through the estimated US$10 billion global trade in wild animals, pets and animal parts. Hundreds of federal agents from several government agencies are policing borders, ports, airports and other places.

 

Graham Wynne, head of Britain's Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, said it is not just a US problem.

 

"Virtually every government around the world is putting too little emphasis on trade and poultry," Wynne said. "You really cannot do too much vigilance on the movement of poultry products because that's going to be the most likely route in."

 

Wild bird experts say the virus appears to be spreading along trade routes. They point to Africa's first cases of bird flu, which were discovered at a farm in Nigeria in February.

 

"Most of these outbreaks have not been directly related to the migration of birds," said Lim Kim Keang, head of the Nature Society's bird group in Singapore. He cited the daily smuggling of an estimated 4,500 chickens into Vietnam from China. The H5N1 virus has shown up in samples taken from some of the confiscated birds.

 

Too much remains unknown about the virus, Bennun said. "That means people are working largely on assumptions, and assumptions can be dangerous," he said.