UK Environment Secretary David Miliband says that there was a lapse in bio-security at Suffolk poultry farm of Bernard Matthews company in England.
“There has obviously been a lapse in bio-security because the poultry has got from Hungary to the UK to the processing plant and it has got form the processing plant to the turkey shed.”
“So there has clearly been a lapse in bio-security.”
“Our officials at Defra, the Food Standards Agency and the Health Protection Agency are engaged in a very detailed, but necessarily complex, investigation including working with the Hungarian authorities and with the Bernard Matthews company.”
With the bird flu spreading around the world, the virus has turned up in birds in Asia and Europe, Africa and, most recently, England. So far, bird flu has mostly been passed from birds either to other birds or, in isolated cases, to humans.
If the bird flu virus mutates into a strain that can pass more readily from human to human, people will have no immunity and the flu will probably pass rapidly from person to person, creating a pandemic. Flu vaccines can only be made to protect against a particular virus, and, since the virus had yet to be passed from human to human, no vaccine has been developed.