UK: Meat from bird-flu farm ?was sent abroad?

[hawkeye]

Ridiculous.


Meat from bird-flu farm ?was sent abroad?

Defra to investigate claims by Hungary Loophole ?exploited by Bernard Matthews?
An investigation was under way last night after claims that poultry meat was exported from the Suffolk farm at the centre of the bird flu outbreak after the disease was identified.

Despite the imposition of quarantine rules, six trucks of poultry products from the farm owned by Bernard Matthews were said to have arrived in Hungary on Thursday.

The Department for Enviornment, Food and Rural Affairs launched an investigation into the claims made last night by Lajos Bognar, Hungary?s Deputy Chief Vet.

The movement of meat from a site infected with the deadly H5N1 strain of avian flu was said by a Defra spokeswoman to be within the rules, but caused astonishment among opposition groups.

David Miliband, Secretary of State for the Environment, has already been forced to defend Defra?s handling of the outbreak and will come under pressure to explain the latest revelation today. Peter Ainsworth, the Shadow Environment Secretary, said: ?I?m increasingly bemused at the unfolding saga and finding it increasingly difficult to understand what?s going on.

?It?s exactly how you turn a drama into a crisis. I can?t think of anything more calculated to damage public confidence.?

Strict rules came into force ten days ago at the farm and meat processing site in Holton to ensure that the virus was contained, but a loophole in the regulations allows limited exemptions. Live birds, eggs and carcasses cannot be moved from infected sites, but processed meat in storage is exempt from the isolation rules.

Among the possibilities being examined by Defra is the suggestion that exported poultry products may have originally come from Hungary and been stored in a refrigeration unit in the same meat processing building that the infected turkeys were taken to in order to be gassed, before being returned to the Continent.

Dr Bognar told Channel 4: ?I can say that, from the protection zone from the UK, six trucks arrived from the last week to Hungary.?

Tests are now being carried out in Hungary to assess the safety of the poultry consignments and results are expected today. Dr Bognar said that Hungarian and British vets will meet tomorrow to discuss their findings. However, he said that he believed it unlikely that the infection in Hungary had led to the British outbreak.

All movements of poultry products for export from the farm site had been completed by Thursday, when scientists linked the outbreak to avian flu in geese in Hungary and the firm announced that it was stopping imports from the country.

A spokesman for Bernard Matthews would only say: ?Bernard Matthews can confirm that it imports meat from Hungary and exports it to Hungary as well. All these imports and exports are regulated and Bernard Matthews adheres strictly to all the regulations.?

A Defra spokeswoman said: ?Depending on the type of product and the date of slaughter and which farm it originated from, it is possible that poultry products from the Suffolk plant could have met the requirement for movement outside the restricted area.?

Mr Miliband was forced to defend the decision to allow Bernard Matthews to continue importing meat from Hungary. The firm maintained last week that there could be no link between the outbreaks because none of its farms or factories was closer than 110 miles to the Hungarian farms where avian flu was found. But it emerged yesterday that last Tuesday the firm imported 20 tons of bird meat from an abattoir 30 miles from the Hungarian outbreak.

Government inspectors knew of the intention to bring the products to Britain and took no action to stop it. The abattoir was outside the Hungarian exclusion zone and the import was legal. Mr Miliband said that to have banned meat imports from Hungary would have contravened trade rules.

 

[HenryN]

Re: UK: Meat from bird-flu farm ?was sent abroad?

Britain may have reinfected Europe with bird flu



<!-- END: Module - Main Heading --><!--CMA user Call Diffrenet Variation Of Image --><!-- BEGIN: Module - M24 Article Headline with no image (a) --><!--set value for print friendly --><!-- getting the section url from article. This has been done so that correct url isgenerated if we are coming from a section or topic --><!-- Print Author name associated with the article --><!-- Print Author name from By Line associated with the article -->Valerie Elliott, Countryside Editor of The Times


<!-- END: Module - M24 Article Headline with no image --><!-- Article Copy module --><!-- BEGIN: Module - Main Article --><!-- Check the Article Type and display accordingly--><!-- Print Author image associated with the Author--><!-- Print the body of the article--><!-- Pagination --><!--Display article with page breaks -->Six lorryloads of turkey meat sent to Hungary last week from the Bernard Matthews plant at the centre of the avian flu outbreak were raw and may have returned the H5N1 virus to Central Europe.
The revelation immediately sparked a political and diplomatic row between London and Budapest. Miklos Suth, the Hungarian chief vet, said that he was outraged by the consignment of raw meat from an infected zone.
Poultry industry chiefs and farmers were incensed by the move and believed that it would lead to a collapse of consumer confidence in all turkey and chicken, especially as the route of the infection from Hungary to Suffolk has still not been established.
The news came as it was confirmed last night that Bernard Matthews had been given permission to reopen the abattoir part of his processing unit at Holton, Suffolk, where 160,000 birds were culled to halt the spread of the disease a week ago. Supermarkets report that the biggest loss in sales is for Bernard Matthews branded products and buyers are privately reporting to industry sources a drop of 50 per cent in the firm?s products. Other poultry sales are 10 per cent down.
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The Bernard Matthews operation is a complex one. He sends hatching eggs to Hungary where the chicks are fattened up on farms

Valerie Elliott

• <!-- IGNORE: We are just using this link to invoke a pop up for demo purposes. Is not reflective of the REAL url. -->
• There also appears to be a North-South divide over the scare: many more shoppers in London and the South East are shunning Bernard Matthews meat than those in the North East and North West.

The Food Standards Agency is still searching documents and meat held in cold stores to check whether any possible infected meat has entered the food chain.
The conduct of Bernard Matthews itself is under increasing scrutiny. One Whitehall official described ?quiet rage? over delays by the company in handing over transport documents listing the consignments that have travelled between Britain and Hungary. It took three days for the company to accede to requests for information.
A senior executive at the company had told ministers that meat from Hungary came only from the Sarkov plant, more than 100 miles away from the restricted zone. It was a government meathygiene inspector who spotted a label revealing that meat had come from an abattoir in Kecskemet, just outside the H5N1 zone.
There was disbelief in farming circles that the meat exported to Hungary last week was raw. A European Commission spokesman said that it was legal to send raw meat to Hungary provided that the product did not come from poultry slaughtered in the protection zone around an outbreak; that the meat was processed and packed separately; and that it had been held in separate cold storage.
Chris Huhne, the Liberal Democrat rural affairs spokesman, said, however, that even if it was allowed within the letter of the law, ?Such a move was unwise and I can understand why the Hungarians are hopping mad about it especially when the source of infection is still unknown?.
For the past 24 hours government officials defended the exports because the meat was cooked and therefore of minimal risk of spreading the virus. Mr Suth confirmed, however, that the meat was raw and that the Holton plant exported only raw, processed turkey meat, which is used for the production of sausages at the SaGa Foods Sarkov plant. These products are then distributed in Hungary, Germany and Italy.
A meeting between David Miliband, the Environment Secretary, and Borbala Czako, the Hungarian Ambassador to London, was hastily arranged yesterday in attempt to repair co-operation between the two EU member states. Mr Miliband also telephoned his Hungrian counterpart, Jozsef Graf, and Mr Suth.
A spokesman for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs would not comment directly about the raw meat assertion and said that the matter was under investigation. Another official had previously said that there was no risk from cooked meat that had left the Bernard Matthews farm. ?The heating process quickly kills the virus and therefore this meat will be perfectly safe,? she said.
Mr Miliband toured television studios to defend the containment of the outbreak and the investigations into the source of the infection.
The British authorities were informed yesterday that checks by the Hungarians on the movement of meat from last November had shown that no poultry from the Csongrad region, at the centre of the H5N1 outbreak, had been sent to abattoirs used by Bernard Matthews at Sarkov or Kecskemet.
Scientific and veterinary experts in Brussels also believe that there is no evidence that turkeys in Hungary are infected with the virus and believe that the most likely source of contamination in Britain is the movement of people, vehicles, packaging or equipment. Transmission by wild birds also remains a possibility.
A veterinary report on the precise match of the lethal avian flu strain is to be published in Brussels today and an epidemiological report into the investigaton in Britain on Friday. A review of the EU rules on the trade and movement of poultry from countries with an outbreak of H5N1 is also now inevitable.
There is also considerable confusion about the rules. A Brussels spokesman said that the export of raw processed meat ?in principle may not cause a problem provided it was processed and packed separately from any meat from poultry slaughtered in a protection zone?.
It is not even clear if there is a cooking facility at the Bernard Matthews Holton plant and a spokesman for the company was unable to give the information to The Times yesterday.


http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/health/article1375473.ece