U.S. Weighing Canadian Poultry Ban

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency said Sunday that a duck at a commercial poultry farm in British Columbia had tested positive for bird flu. The virus was a low-pathogenic North American form that doesn't kill poultry and is not a threat to people, officials said. But the virus sickens and weakens the birds, and entire flocks are destroyed to prevent its spread.

The virulent form of bird flu in Asia has not been found in the U.S. and is only now spreading into eastern Europe. Authorities there say that cooking kills the virus; health officials in the U.S. say that eating properly handled and cooked poultry is safe.

The farm with the infected duck, in Chilliwack outside of Vancouver, isn't licensed to export. Authorities have begun killing about 56,000 birds on the farm with carbon dioxide gas and have quarantined four other farms within three miles of the area.

An outbreak of bird flu in 2004 in British Columbia prompted the killing of 17 million birds.

Evans said Canada would have preferred that the U.S. take no action since the virus found in the duck is different from the one in Asia.

"That would have been consistent with how we've treated low-path findings in the United States previously," he said. "But again, we're working in an extremely sensitive international environment at this point."

The U.S. bans imports of poultry from any country where the high-pathogenic virus from Asia has been found. Those countries include Cambodia, Romania, China, Russia, Indonesia, South Korea, Japan, Thailand, Kazakhstan, Turkey, Laos, Vietnam and Malaysia.

Meanwhile, Japan began asking travelers from bird flu-affected areas to have their shoes disinfected upon arrival at the country's four major airports, including Tokyo's international gateway at Narita. The Japanese were trying to prevent poultry manure contaminated with the bird flu virus from being tracked into their country.

Last December, Japan confirmed a single human case of bird flu but the patient recovered.

In Thailand, epidemiologists and laboratory experts from 11 Asian countries were attending a four-day meeting in the capital, Bangkok, to fine tune their country's plans to prepare for a flu pandemic. The World Health Organization was working with the nations at the meeting, which began Monday.

Australia's government sought to clear up misconceptions about bird flu by launching a Web site about the illness. The site provides news about the spread of the virus and gives tips on how to prepare for a possible human flu pandemic.

With China reporting outbreaks almost daily, the risk that the virus might cross the border into Hong Kong is growing, said Leung Pak-yin, chief of the Center for Health Protection.

Hong Kong has been on hyper-alert for signs of bird flu because the city's economy was ravaged by the 2003 outbreak of SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome. SARS also killed nearly 300 people here and caused widespread panic.

Leung on Monday pledged to business leaders that officials are ready for a flu pandemic.

"If anything happens in Hong Kong, we are sure that the one thing we want to ensure is we have the lowest mortality rate in Hong Kong and that we are the place that is going to recover first in the world, both from the health aspect and also from the economic aspect," Leung told members of the Hong Kong General Chamber of Commerce.

Dr. David Salisbury, the British Department of Health's head of immunization, wrote to family doctors warning that all of the national stock of 14 million doses of vaccine has been allocated.

"The vulnerable sick and the older population, they're the people who are going to be most affected by our running out," said Dr. Laurence Buckman of the British Medical Association.

So the government is handing out doses from its emergency vaccine stockpiles, ordering more from manufacturers, and urging doctors not to give flu shots to the so-called "worried well," reports Holt.