The mass production of poultry to comply with ever increasing demands for cheaper produce is facilitating the rapid spread of infections such as avian flu among bird flocks, a professor of food safety warned yesterday.
Dr Patrick Wall of the Centre for Food Safety at University College Dublin said this mass production of poultry combined with its subsequent global distribution meant germs were disseminated all over the world very rapidly.
"There is a price to be paid for this demand for cheap food and this is the price we are paying," he said. "There is a price to be paid for having everything ready every day. Progress isn't always progress."
Dr Wall said while there was no danger of people contracting avian flu from eating Thai chicken, people did not think enough about what they ate. "You would not put diesel into your petrol car, but people will eat food and they don't care where it comes from. They forget your health is your wealth," he said.
He added that Thai chicken imported into the EU would be checked at the point of entry. "After that it's in a single market and can move freely and with the volume coming in, it's only samples that can be checked".
The acting chief executive of the Food Safety Authority of Ireland Mr Alan Reilly said the reason Thai chicken was being imported into the Republic was because it was cheap. It is used mainly in the catering sectors, especially by take-aways.
He believes poor standards of hygiene and sanitation at Asian markets where chickens are sold may go some way towards explaining why this bird flu has jumped the species barrier to infect humans.
These markets, he said, are often packed with cages of live birds and the hygiene standards are primitive. If a bird was being slaughtered in these conditions the person killing it could perhaps get a bite, he said.
Humans are unlikely to catch avian flu unless they come in close contact with live infected birds.
The first human cases were reported in Hong Kong in 1997.