Bird flu “rumours” are affecting the poultry industry and causing financial losses of up to Rs300 million daily, former chairman of the Pakistan Poultry Association (PPA), Khalil Abbasi, said Thursday at a press conference at the Karachi Press Club.
“The bird flu hype is part of the media campaign of a US-based commercial enterprise, which has former US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld as president. All of this is being done merely to boost the sales of its product ‘tami-flu’,” Abbasi alleged. He said that the H5N1 (bird flu) virus was first detected in Scotland in 1960 and it still exists in Great Lakes area of the USA, but it was “overplayed” when it hit Thailand and other Asian countries. “Why are we assuming that the virus would turn ‘vicious?’ This is a fallacy because no human transmission has been reported so far in the world,” Abbasi said.
PPA chairman, Abdul Basit, said that since 2004, bird flu fears had caused losses worth billions of rupees to the poultry industry. This, he said, had resulted in the closure of 40 percent of farms. “Hundreds of thousands of workers have lost their jobs only due to ‘sensational news’ because no human infection has been found so far in Pakistan,” Basit said.
The “chicken crisis,” the PPA chairman claimed, was in the same list as the sugar, wheat and flour “crises.” There are around 25,000 poultry farms in the country, employing over 1.5 million people with an investment of around Rs 200 billion. Approximately Rs 45 billion to Rs 50 billion worth of agricultural products and by-products are being used in poultry feed, the PPA chairman said, adding that the poultry crisis would ultimately compound the agricultural crisis.
A vaccine is available to effectively control the virus in birds, and effective use of this vaccine in Pindi, Islamabad and Abbotabad has controlled the disease in those areas. Karachi will follow suite soon, Basit said.
He said that around Rs 300 million were being spent on this vaccine annually in Pakistan.
The PPA urged the government to immediately implement the law for distance between farms in order to control the spread of the virus, provide subsidies on imports of the bird flu vaccine, and provide the medicine free of cost to affected areas.
Basit read out a statement issued by Bernard Vallet, director-general of the Paris-based Animal Health Organization. Vallet said that the risks of bird flu were “over-estimated and fears of an imminent pandemic were non-scientific assumptions.”
Layer chickens were vaccinated and this is the first time that bird flu has infected broiler chickens, Dr Jalali said, adding that since the life span of broiler chickens was around seven weeks, farmers usually did not vaccinate them. He called for the implementation of a vaccination programme for the eight million broiler chickens in Pakistan, in order to prevent an outbreak of the virus.
One of the speakers at the press conference blamed the media for “over-emphasizing” the fears of bird flu. This led to a heated exchange between poultry and health officials and journalists present there.