British response to outbreak defended

British environment secretary David Miliband has assured MPs the British government is determined to "stamp out" the Suffolk …

British environment secretary David Miliband has assured MPs the British government is determined to "stamp out" the Suffolk bird flu outbreak and to quickly regain the UK's disease-free status.

In a Commons statement yesterday Mr Miliband rejected Liberal Democrat criticism and said he was satisfied the official response to the outbreak of the H5N1 strain at the Bernard Matthews farm had been "rapid, well co-ordinated and appropriate".

With the cull of the farm's 159,000 turkeys due to be completed last night, and with strict controls in place around the site near Lowestoft, Mr Miliband repeated official advice that the risk to the public was "negligible". He specifically repeated the Food Standards Agency view "that there is no risk in eating any sort of properly cooked poultry, including turkey and eggs."

Speaking after a meeting of the government's civil contingencies Cobra committee, Mr Miliband confirmed the government did not yet know how the disease had arrived in Suffolk and stressed it was "a very high priority to get to the root of this".

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However, while the British government and farmers had put "extensive measures" in place, the minister declined to rule out any further incidents. He did not want to say he was predicting rising numbers of bird flu outbreaks: "Equally, the fact is that there are incidents around the world and so there are risks and it would be wrong for me to say there won't be future incidents."

Mr Miliband won Conservative backing for his declared goals "to stamp out the disease, to protect public health, to protect animal health and welfare, and to regain disease-free status in the UK".

Peter Ainsworth, for the Tories, said the arrival of the disease was a blow to the country's poultry industry but stressed this must not be allowed to become a crisis.

Adding the additional goal - "to reassure the public that eating poultry is entirely safe" - Mr Ainsworth expressed concern about a suggestion by a junior minister in the department of environment, food and rural affairs that they might never know the exact cause of this outbreak.

He said it made it "extremely difficult" to know that the government was taking all appropriate action to prevent further outbreaks "if we do not know how the disease got here in the first place".

Mr Miliband said getting to the root of this was "a very high priority" and they were pursuing all possible avenues to establish the cause.

"The most likely does lie in a link with the wild bird population," he said. "But that does not mean we should not pursue any other avenue with full speed, and that is what we are doing."