Dutch to Keep Poultry Indoors to Prevent Bird Flu
Date: 17-Aug-05
Country: THE NETHERLANDS
Russia is battling to contain a bird flu outbreak, dangerous to humans, which has spread from Siberia to other Russian regions and Mongolia in the past week. Kazakhstan also found the the deadly H5N1 strain last week.
There are concerns that the virus could spread westward to Europe, Middle East and Africa as tens of millions of birds continue their migration to warmer climates from next month ahead of Russia's harsh winter.
"Agriculture Minister (Cees) Veerman will soon announce a package of measures to prevent bird flu reaching the Netherlands," the Dutch ministry said in a statement. "These... include keeping industrial poultry indoors."
The measure excludes birds held by people for hobby reasons, the statement said.
A relatively small part of the some 105 million poultry in the Netherlands, one of the world's biggest meat exporters, are kept outdoors for animal welfare reasons.
But a special bird flu commission of Dutch virologists and veterinarians, set up to advise the ministry on how to prevent the disease said there was a danger that infected migrating birds could spread the deadly disease to outdoor poultry.
"The threat (for the Netherlands) is there," professor Albert Osterhaus, influenza expert of the Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam, told Reuters.
"We advised the minister to keep all free-range birds indoors because we wouldn't like to see a repeat of the culling of 30 million chickens in 2003," said Osterhaus, who is a member of the bird flu commission.
The Netherlands was hit by an outbreak of bird flu disease in 2003, which led to the slaughter of a quarter of all Dutch poultry at a cost of hundreds of millions of euros.
Local poultry farms are being tested regularly since then.
Last week, the farm ministry said it had stepped up monitoring of migrating birds and launched weekly tests of birds' droppings.
Senior Russian agricultural officials believe the deadly H5N1 strain was brought by migrating birds from Asia, where more than 50 people have died from that strain since 2003.