HUNGARY:Britain suspects its bird flu outbreak may be traced to Sarvar, a town in Hungary near the Austrian border. Daniel McLaughlinwent there to find out
Cradling five boxes of turkey sausages in one hand, and clutching a basket brimming with turkey breast and pate in the other, Janos Sargi is not a man haunted by the spectre of bird flu.
While officials at SaGa Foods in Hungary refuse to answer questions directly about its possible link to Britain's bird flu outbreak, Sargi and other current and former workers at the processing plant robustly defend its food safety standards.
"We haven't heard of any connection and we're not concerned about disease," said the portly, white-haired Sargi outside the factory that sent a consignment of partly processed meat to the Bernard Matthews-owned operation in southeast England just days before it was struck by bird flu. "We maintain good hygiene here and have never had any problems," insisted Sargi, filling the back of his car with the cut-price SaGa meat products that help supplement his monthly €240 pension.
"I started work here cutting up the birds at age 26, and now I'm 63, and I don't remember any food safety worries," said another former worker, Jozsef Nemet. "This place is vital to the town of Sarvar - people here don't really have anything else."
Home to 15,000 people near the Austrian border, Sarvar is surrounded by the poultry farms that supply Hungary's biggest producer of cooked meats, a sprawling operation that employs 2,000 people and fills the air they breathe with the smell of frying turkey.
Few locals seem to be aware of the sudden foreign interest in their town and its main livelihood, but SaGa itself is wary of prying eyes - a security guard tried to stop reporters taking photographs of the factory, and telephone and written requests for interviews were rejected: an assistant to Andrew Griggs, the British boss of the Sarvar plant, said he was travelling and could not be contacted, and that all other senior managers were in meetings.
While Britain says it is still trying to determine whether meat sent from Sarvar caused the outbreak in Suffolk, Hungary says it will prove its innocence in a report to be handed to the European Commission today.
However, the web of turkey traffic, and recrimination, grew more tangled with the revelation that food products made from the suspect meat may have been exported back to Hungary from Suffolk - although experts insist that the avian flu virus cannot survive in properly cooked meat.
Opinion of the factory floor in Sarvar is unequivocal.
"Everything's fine here. No special measures have been introduced," said Attila, who skins turkeys in the plant, adding that staff were routinely taught how to look for symptoms of bird flu in dead poultry and received a flu vaccination upon request.
"We wear special overalls at work, and everything is disinfected. We pay a lot of attention to hygiene," he said.
Since fowl in Romania became Europe's first to suffer infection in October 2005, more than a dozen EU states have been affected by the H5N1 strain of bird flu which has killed more than 150 people, mostly in southeast Asia.
Scientists fear the virus could mutate into a form that passes easily between humans and could cause a devastating pandemic.
In Hungary, SaGa insists its Sarvar plant had no connection or contact with two goose farms that were hit by bird flu last month, when the virus reappeared in central Europe for the first time in almost six months.
It has emerged, however, that meat from a Hungarian slaughterhouse close to - but not inside - the exclusion zone around the affected goose farms went via Sarvar to Suffolk, where 160,000 turkeys were later slaughtered after bird flu struck the flock. British officials, under fire for allowing poultry trade to continue with Hungary after it suffered an outbreak of bird flu, say they adhered to strict EU guidelines on the matter.
"Those goose farms are 350km from Sarvar, and no link has been found through personnel, eggs or feed that could have carried the virus," said Laszlo Barany, president of the Hungarian Poultry Product Council, who added that SaGa did not have any history of food safety problems.
British vets will travel to Hungary this week to conduct a full examination of the Sarvar operations, including "turkey farms, the slaughterhouse and the freezers", Mr Barany said.
"SaGa has decided not to export any more meat products to Britain until the British vets have conducted their checks and are satisfied," he added. "It is up to the vets and other experts to establish how the virus got to the UK. Right now, no one knows."