EU to ban all imports of pet and exotic birds

THE EU is expected to ban all imports of pet and exotic birds today as another case of the lethal H5N1 bird flu virus was confirmed in Russia.

Health Protection Commissioner Markos Kyprianou will propose the temporary ban at a meeting of the Food Chain and Animal Health Committee.

This is likely to be accepted by the Agriculture Ministers meeting in Luxembourg and the ban is likely to come into force immediately.

European Commission spokesperson Jonathan Todd said: “What is currently under consideration is a possible ban on all imports of pet birds.”

At present close to two million exotic and captive birds are imported into the EU each year as pets.

Health experts have estimated that up to 5,000 people could die in the event of an influenza pandemic reaching Ireland.

Estimates also suggest quarter of the workforce would take between five and eight days off over a three month period and absenteeism would double in the private sector and increase by two thirds in the public sector.

Director of the Health Surveillance Protection Centre (HSPC), Dr Darina Flanagan, said there was no way of knowing when a pandemic might occur.

“It’s like trying to predict an earthquake in Los Angeles, you know it will happen sometime, but you don’t know when,” she said. Experts put the shortest interval between pandemics at 11 years and the longest at 39. It is now 37 years since the last influenza pandemic which occurred in 1968, claiming 800,000 lives.

Dr Flanagan was speaking at a special media briefing yesterday on pandemic influenza and avian flu and the measures the Government is taking to reduce their impact.

She said it was important people were aware that if bird flu did surface in Ireland, it was not the same as a flu pandemic. This is because H5N1, currently the most deadly strain of bird flu, has so far only passed from birds to humans (claiming 61 lives in Asia) and not from human to human, making it far more difficult to spread. However, the Government is planning talks with drug companies currently working on developing a vaccine for the human strain of H5N1, which has yet to emerge. The Department of Health’s Principal Officer for Community Health, Brian Mullins, said they were looking at “sleeping contracts”

Earlier this week GlaxoSmithKline said it could produce a vaccine within four months of the human strain of H5N1 developing.

Mr Mullins said the Government was also stockpiling anti-viral drugs to deal with an influenza pandemic. Up to 48,000 doses of anti-viral drugs have already been acquired, with another 600,000 doses due this year and a further 400,000 next year.