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Europe grapples with bird flu issue
(AP)
Updated: 2005-10-15 11:26 Officials in the Balkans sought to soothe fears by showing they weren't
afraid of fowl.
Romanian President Traian Basescu urged his people to continue eating chicken
Friday, saying his wife is cooking it at home. In Hungary, where the Poultry
Product Board reported the sale of chicken immediately fell 10-15 percent when
the outbreak started, Agriculture Minister Jozsef Graf ate a roasted leg of
chicken Friday at a downtown food market.
The risk of contracting bird flu from handling raw packaged chicken bought in
supermarkets is considered negligible, said Bernard Vallat, director general of
the World Organization for Animal Health, adding that no such cases have ever
been recorded.
During the late 1980s and 1990s, mad cow disease severely hurt the beef
industry in several European countries. Exports from affected countries were
banned and thousands of cattle were destroyed to stop the spread.
The World Health Organization moved Friday to calm fears about bird flu by
stressing the risk of people getting infected is very low.
Since the outbreak began in Asia two years ago, 117 people have become
infected and they were mostly poultry farmers and others involved in plucking
and preparing sick birds, handling cockfights or playing with ducks and drinking
duck blood.
However, concerns over infection ran high in Greece, where citizens were
reported to be crowding pharmacies to buy the antiviral Tamiflu drug, as well as
flu vaccines — which experts say are useless against bird flu.
The rush prompted the health ministry to issue a public appeal against
panic-induced shopping for vaccines.
Deputy Health Minister Thanassis Yiannopoulos told private Alter television
on Friday: "We must not all rush to the pharmacy to buy vaccines, because the
people who really need them will not have any."
Seasonal flu vaccines are considered important for the elderly, young
children and people with heart disease and chronic respiratory diseases.
However, stamping out the outbreaks in poultry swiftly is important for human
health because the further the virus is allowed to spread, the more
opportunities it has to mutate into a form that passes easily to and between
people, sparking a human flu pandemic.
Authorities were combing areas along the path of migratory birds for dead
birds, and rushing any samples to laboratories for testing, Agriculture Ministry
official Beytullah Okay said.
Experts believe the disease came from wild birds migrating through Turkey
from the Ural Mountains in Russia to Africa.
Turkish officials carried out medical tests on nine people living in a
neighborhood where 40 pigeons reportedly died, but released the nine from
medical observation Friday after determining they did not likely have bird
flu.
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