Check out this from The Guardian:
2.15pm
France confirms bird flu on poultry farm
Associated PressSaturday February 25, 2006
The European Union's first outbreak of the lethal H5N1 strain of bird flu in commercial poultry was confirmed today in France, the EU's largest poultry producer.
But President Jacques Chirac, trying to keep the lucrative market alive, sought to ease fears by insisting that eating poultry is safe and panic is unjustified.
The agriculture ministry said lab tests confirmed H5N1 in turkeys at a farm of more than 11,000 birds in the south-east Ain region.
Hundreds of birds died and the remainder were slaughtered even before the presence of the lethal virus was official. The farm has been sealed off.
However, Chirac said there is "no danger in eating poultry and eggs" and that panic among consumers is "totally unjustified." * (Er, is it, really? Remember the Mad cow disease & the lies We've been told about it? Now, it's easy to blame the population for not believing the politicians...)
"In any case, the virus in question ... is automatically destroyed by cooking. So there is strictly no danger," the French president said as he inaugurated the annual agriculture fair in Paris - where poultry has been banned as a precaution.
Panic appears to have developed among consumers. There had been a drop of up to 30 percent in poultry purchases even before the announcement.
In an indication of the global impact of the French case, Japan temporarily suspended imports of French poultry, including the delicacy foie gras, meat and other internal organs, (what a nice precision!!) according to the Japanese embassy in Paris. In 2005, Japan imported 1,510 metric tons of duck and other poultry meat and 377 metric tons of internal organs, including foie gras, from France.
The spread of bird flu to commercial stocks in France, which has been working for months to prevent and prepare for an outbreak, served as a sobering sign for other developed countries that consider themselves well protected.
France has some 200,000 farms that raise 900 million birds each year. In 2004, the latest year for which figures were available, the French poultry sector generated more than €3 billion in revenues - more than 20 percent of total EU production. (Thanks to the foreign viewpoint, we can clearly get the point, whithout the pseudo-reassuring, hypocritical jargon...that our home politicians use, pretending to hide what is really at stake, i.e. "Money, money, money, money...lalala",)
Scientists fear the H5N1 strain, which has spread from Asia to at least 10 European countries and Africa, could mutate into a form that is easily transmitted between humans, sparking a pandemic.
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