IRELAND: As the Minister for Agriculture and Food, Mary Coughlan, expressed concern at the spread of avian flu to three EU states, the Labour Party has called for the setting up of a special unit to deal with any outbreak here.
Ms Coughlan said her department's assessment was that while the further spread of the virus had obviously increased the risk to Ireland somewhat, the risk still remains low. "While the department will continue to do what it can to prevent the introduction of the virus into the country, it was important also that poultry flock owners followed the bio-security advice issued by the department and that those travelling to affected countries took sensible precautions," she said.
The Minister reiterated the need for continued vigilance and repeated her department's assessment that, notwithstanding the events of the past week, the risk to Ireland posed by the spread of the H5N1 virus "though increased, was still low".
Predicting that the disease would arrive here in the not too distant future, Dr Mary Upton, Labour's agriculture spokeswoman, repeated her call on the Government to appoint a single figurehead to co-ordinate the campaign against the disease and to establish a bio-security unit.
Calling for a strengthening of checks at points of entry into the State, she said its spread from Asia through Turkey to Greece, Italy and even Nigeria underlined the ability of the virus to travel and the difficulty in containing it.
Iran yesterday confirmed its first case of the potentially deadly H5NI strain of the disease found in dead swans near the Caspian Sea port of Bandar-e-Anzali.