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UNITED NATIONS — Experts suspect the current spread of bird flu in Asia, Africa and Europe is mainly a result of trade in infected live birds rather than transmission through wild birds, the U.N. official coordinating the global fight against avian influenza said Friday.
Example: the outbreak in Nigeria was caused by the import of poults — young birds — from China. Not migrating birds.
There are many difficulties involved with this, not least the huge illegal trade in poultry, and for that matter, in wild animals of all kinds, animals generally kept in perfect disease-mongering conditions.
In the mean time, Avian flu has resurfaced in a fourth northern Nigerian state. Turkey announced an H5N1 avian influenza outbreak at a farm in the southeastern part of the country, as English authorities explored the possibility of a connection between recent outbreaks in Suffolk and Hungary.The DEFRA (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) report said a company meat processing plant adjacent to the farm handled imported poultry products from Hungary.
Tests were being carried out on blood samples from four children suffering from bird-flu-like symptoms, a private Turkish television station reported.
The children were from villages in eastern Turkey where authorities confirmed that a number of domestic poultry had died after contracting the avian flu.
Agriculture Ministry workers began a cull of all poultry in four villages in the eastern Turkish province of Batman.
So, are these outbreaks related. Is this a case of big industry trying to hide the fact that they may be spreading the H5N1 virus, not wild birds?
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