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U.S. Seeks Details on Canada Bird Flu Case NewsMax.com Wires WASHINGTON -- U.S. officials need details on a Canadian case of bird flu to decide whether to continue a ban on poultry from British Columbia. Canadian officials said the case of flu, confirmed Sunday, wasn't the virulent form in Southeast Asia blamed for more than 60 human deaths. Still, the U.S. on Monday banned imports of poultry from mainland British Columbia to prevent the spread of the virus to U.S. flocks. Canadian officials plan to report to the U.S. within 24 hours, according to Canada's chief veterinary officer, Dr. Brian Evans. Depending on the results, the U.S. could restrict imports from a smaller, regional area, U.S. Agriculture Department spokesman Jim Rogers said. "We're waiting to get more information from Canada, at which point we could be able to scale back" the ban, Rogers said. "We just need that information." Story Continues Below
The governments of Taiwan, Japan and Hong Kong indicated they would take similar action. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency said Sunday that a duck at a commercial poultry farm in British Columbia had tested positive for bird flu. The virus was a low-pathogenic North American form that doesn't kill poultry and is not a threat to people, officials said. But the virus sickens and weakens the birds, and entire flocks are destroyed to prevent its spread. The virulent form of bird flu in Asia has not been found in the U.S. and is only now spreading into eastern Europe. Authorities there say that cooking kills the virus; health officials in the U.S. say that eating properly handled and cooked poultry is safe. The farm with the infected duck, in Chilliwack outside of Vancouver, isn't licensed to export. Authorities have begun killing about 56,000 birds on the farm with carbon dioxide gas and have quarantined four other farms within three miles of the area. An outbreak of bird flu in 2004 in British Columbia prompted the killing of 17 million birds. Evans said Canada would have preferred that the U.S. take no action since the virus found in the duck is different from the one in Asia. "That would have been consistent with how we've treated low-path findings in the United States previously," he said. "But again, we're working in an extremely sensitive international environment at this point." The U.S. bans imports of poultry from any country where the high-pathogenic virus from Asia has been found. Those countries include Cambodia, Romania, China, Russia, Indonesia, South Korea, Japan, Thailand, Kazakhstan, Turkey, Laos, Vietnam and Malaysia.
© 2005 Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Editor's note: Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
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