David Bowles (RSPCA): "A wide-ranging ban is needed immediately"

Oct 24, 2005 12:27 GMT  ·  By

Following the death of a parrot infected with the H5N1 virus, which was quarantined in the UK, the farmers and conservationists have renewed their calls for a ban on the import of live birds, BBC reports.

The parrot came from Surinam, a region which had not recorded any case of avian flu, but was quarantined with birds from Taiwan.

"The first good news is that quarantine actually worked, but the fact that we're importing live birds at all into the European Union surely should be stopped at this particular time.", Tim Bennett, the National Farmers' Union president said.

Currently, there is a ban on imports only from the countries with cases of avian flu, such as Romania, Thailand and Turkey.

The head of External Affairs for the RSPCA, David Bowles, said a wide-ranging ban was needed immediately.

"At the moment it's a very strange situation - we have a ban on imports from countries where they have avian flu but we don't have a ban on other countries. And obviously the traders who make a lot of money out of this trade will go to the weakest link, they'll go to the country where they think the controls are less, they'll go to the country where they're still allowed to export", Bowles declared.

As of July 2005, most human cases of avian influenza in East Asia have been attributed to consumption of diseased poultry. Person-to-person transmission has not been unequivocally confirmed in the outbreaks in East Asia. On September 29, 2005, David Nabarro, the newly appointed Senior United Nations System Coordinator for Avian and Human Influenza, warned the world that an outbreak of Avian influenza could kill 5 to 150 million people.