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Thursday, 27 October 2005 11:03

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Quarantine blunder in Parrot bird flu case

Government vets have been criticised for contravening European law by advising private bird importers to mix consignments of birds from different parts of the world in the same quarantine facility.

European regulations forbid such a practice because of the risks of spreading bird flu but it is believed that a licensed facility in Essex was used to quarantine a consignment of parrots from South America in the same unit as a consignment of exotic birds from Taiwan.

On Monday the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs reported that a parrot from Surinam had become infected with the H5N1 strain of avian flu after being housed with birds from Taiwan.

Christiana Senni, of the World Parrot Trust, said: "It's unbelievable that Defra can't understand the detail of the EU regulation on quarantines, which clearly states that each quarantine unit should hold only birds of the same consignment," she said.

"This, of course, is an obvious requirement, otherwise the whole principle of quarantine would be useless, as this latest incident showed."

Ms Senni cited the wording of the EU regulations governing bird quarantine, which states quarantine units much be kept operationally and physically separated from each other "and in which each unit contains only birds of the same consignment, with the same health status and being therefore one epidemiological unit".

Philip Tod, a spokesman for the European Commission, said: "The European Commission has so far received no information which suggests the UK authorities have breached the requirements. The UK authorities are still investigating the circumstances in this case and the Commission will wait for the outcome of that investigation to properly assess the situation."

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