February 26, 2006
AFP

France is stepping up measures to reassure consumers and contain the spread of bird flu after the discovery of the deadly disease in commercial poultry hit its farming sector hard.

Authorities in the east of the country, where the outbreak was discovered in a turkey farm last Thursday, have tightened restrictions.

On Sunday, they ordered a 10-day ban on anybody approaching small lakes in the Dombes region after “some 50 dead swans and ducks” were collected in the past four days.

The birds were being tested to see if they, too, had succumbed to the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu that had struck the farm and other wildfowl in the region.

The regional government administrator Michel Fuzeau said flights by small pleasure aircraft over the area had also been forbidden so as not to scatter the wild birds already there.

French President Jacques Chirac, attending the opening of a big agricultural fair in Paris on Saturday, pointedly ate pieces of chicken in front of the cameras as he declared that consumers were safe despite the outbreak in France — the first case on an EU farm.

“There is no danger in consuming poultry and eggs,” he said.

“There is no reason to provoke panic, that is just outrageous,” Chirac added, stressing that cooking killed the deadly virus.

But the discovery of the disease in commercial poultry was taking its toll on France’s farm sector, dealing a tough economic blow to a country that is the fourth-biggest poultry exporter in the world, after the United States, China and Brazil.

Domestic consumption was already down 30 percent before the news, and immediately after confirmation Saturday that at least 400 turkeys on the farm had died of H5N1, Japan and Hong Kong placed embargos on French imports of poultry and poultry products — including prized foie gras.

France has 30,600 commercial poultry farms, which produce 700 million birds a year and represent annual revenues of six billion euros (seven billion dollars).

Sixty-five thousand people are employed in the sector, though owners have had to proceed with lay-offs in recent weeks because of the free-fall in demand.

Much of the production — one-third — is concentrated in the northwest Britanny region, with the central Loire and southern Midi-Pyrenees regions following.

The biggest importers of French poultry and associated products are Germany, Britain, Belgium, Luxembourg and Saudi Arabia.

France is by far the biggest exporter of foie gras, producing more than 16,000 tonnes a year mainly from farms in the southwest, the Loire and the eastern Alsace regions.

The discovery of the H5N1 virus on the French turkey farm in the village of Versailleux was the first confirmed case in commercial production in the European Union.

Previously, France, Austria, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Slovakia and Slovenia had recorded virus cases, but they were all detected in wild birds or, in Austria’s case, in birds kept in a park.

Instances of outbreaks among commercial poultry had already been found in eastern Turkey, outside the European bloc.

The source of the contamination in France was not immediately known. The farmer involved, Daniel Clair, said he had raised the birds indoors and they therefore should have been at minimal risk from infection.

The Poultry Industry Federation (FIA) and investigators said the turkeys may have been contaminated by dried duck droppings on the straw used as their bedding.

The H5N1 virus can be deadly to humans, most commonly those who come into regular contact with live or recently killed birds, though no human cases have been reported in the EU.

Since the outbreak of the highly pathogenic form of H5N1 in 2003, at least 92 people have died, mostly in Asia where the disease was first identified.

Health experts fear that the bird-to-bird strain currently making its way around the world might mutate into a form transmissable by humans, resulting in a global pandemic that could kill tens of millions.

Bird flu specialists were to hold a meeting on the spread of the disease at the Paris headquarters of the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) on Monday and Tuesday.