New Bird Flu Concern - Illegal Animal Trade
May 6th, 2006
The legal but offcourse the illegal trade in animals is a huge concern of the top wild bird experts because this can have a huge impact on spreading bird flu.
Even the bird flu has spread from Asia throught Africa and Europe and to Bahamas and Venezela until now hasn’t reached the United States
The director of Norway’s Fridtjof Nansen Institute and chairman of BirdLife International, a global alliance of conservation organizations, ,Mr. Peter Johan Schei, said the United States and other governments should boost trade protections but not lessen attention to bird migration routes.
Schei and Leon Bennun, BirdLife International’s science policy director, agreed that illegally imported poultry and other animal products pose the most immediate risk.
Senior Bush administration officials have said they, too, worry about the bird flu arriving through the estimated $10 billion global trade in wild animals, pets and animal parts. Hundreds of federal agents from several government agencies are policing borders, ports, airports and other places.
Graham Wynne, head of Britain’s Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, said it’s not just a U.S. problem.
“Virtually every government around the world is putting too little emphasis on trade and poultry,” Wynne said. “You really can’t do too much vigilance on the movement of poultry products because that’s going to be the most likely route in.”
“Most of these outbreaks have not been directly related to the migration of birds,” said Lim Kim Keang, head of the Nature Society’s bird group in Singapore. He cited the daily smuggling of an estimated 4,500 chickens into Vietnam from China. The H5N1 virus has shown up in samples taken from some of the confiscated birds.