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http://www.nikkei.co.jp/news/main/20060415AT2M1500M15042006.html
【ニューヨーク＝米州総局】15日付の米紙ニューヨーク・タイムズは、鳥肉の密輸が高病原性鳥インフルエンザ（Ｈ５Ｎ１型）の世界的な感染拡大の一因になっている可能性があると報じた。同紙は欧州やアジアで横行している鳥肉の密輸の実態を紹介。鳥インフルエンザに感染した鶏などが生きたまま密輸されれば、他の鳥類にも感染すると指摘した。
Ｈ５Ｎ１型のウイルスは冷凍肉や羽毛、骨など特定部位に寄生するほか、鳥かごに付着する事例もあり、密輸による感染拡大の危険性が高まっているという。 (20:24)
ニューヨーク・タイムズの英文元記事は次のとおり。ただし写真は見出しのみ。
http://www.nytimes.com/glogin?URI=http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/15/world/europe/15bird.html&OQ=_rQ3D1Q26nQ3DTopQ252fNewsQ252fHealthQ252fDiseasesQ252cQ2520ConditionsQ252cQ2520andQ2520HealthQ2520TopicsQ252fAvianQ2520Influenza&OP=51280fa4Q2FYsScYQ2AQ24niQ2BQ24Q24vLYLFF,YFQ22YwKYsQ24Q2B7Q2AYSrQ2BQ24xSYwKclQ2BQ2Aqyvo7
Bird Flu Virus May Be Spread By Smuggling
ELISABETH ROSENTHAL, International Herald Tribune
New York Times (NY) , Late Edition - Final ed , p1 , Saturday , April 15, 2006
MILAN - Two vans of undercover police inspectors pulled up at a storefront in Milan in March, their target neither terrorists nor drugs.
Picking their way through a refrigerator at the back of a Chinese grocery store off a piazza, the agents found their quarry: bags of duck feet.
This followed a similar raid at a Milan warehouse a few months ago that yielded three million packages of chicken meat smuggled from China.
There is increasing evidence that a thriving international trade in smuggled poultry -- including live birds, chicks and meat -- is helping spread bird flu, experts say.
Poultry smuggling is a huge business that poses a unique threat: The (A)H5N1 bird flu virus is robust enough to survive not just in live birds but also in frozen meat, feathers, bones and even on cages, though it dies with cooking.
"No one knows the real numbers, but they are large," said Timothy E. Moore, director of federal projects at the National Agricultural Biosecurity Center at Kansas State University.
"Behind illegal drug traffic, illegal animals are No. 2," he said. "And there is no doubt in my mind that this will play a prominent role in the spread of this disease. It looks to be the main way it is spreading in some parts of the world," along with the migration of wild birds.
Particularly when smuggled live, poultry can easily pass the disease on to birds in other countries. Though the risk of transmission in, say, infected frozen duck feet in a restaurant is minimal, poultry parts can also spread the disease to birds when used as raw feed or in fertilizer on farms.
Poultry from bird-flu-infected countries has been banned in Europe since 2002, but smuggling seriously undermines those bans.
"In spite of the E.U. ban, we are still seizing Chinese poultry products," said Gen. Emilio Borghini, commander of the Military Police Health Service in Italy.
Many experts are convinced that the illegal import of infected live chicks introduced the virus into Nigeria. Its first cases were confirmed in February, but soon the virus appeared on poultry farms in multiple areas, leading to the widespread culling of birds in a country that can ill afford the loss.
And yet, the disease has not been found in wild birds there.
In early April, Vietnamese health officials said chickens smuggled over the border from China had reintroduced bird flu into their country, which had reported no cases for four months.
No one has any precise sense of the breadth of the trade, or the extent of its role in spreading bird flu, because until recently poultry smuggling was regarded mostly as a nuisance.
There is extensive smuggling between China and Africa. In the developing world, the illegal trade often has economic roots, to avoid duties. But there is a strong cultural element as well. For example, Asian immigrants seek out poultry products, like feet, that may not be available in the West. The illegal meat seized in Italy has been at Chinese stores or warehouses servicing Chinese restaurants.
"I would love to have a map of illegal trade, but I'm embarrassed to say we don't have a good handle on it," said Dr. Juan Lubroth, a senior veterinarian at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome. "We all know it occurs and we are worried, but what we see confiscated is only the tip of the iceberg."
The trade is hard to control because huge amounts cross borders in trucks, carts, planes and boats each day. Smuggled meat from Asia is often loaded in containers with a mishmash of other goods, like clothes, toys and furniture.
"We're aware that the risk to public health can be hidden in these containers, but thousands of containers pass through Italian ports and it is impossible to inspect them all," said Mario Pantano, director of the Military Police Health Service in southern Italy, who said his staff had found poultry products stuffed into shoes.
Late last year, his team discovered 260 tons of poultry meat scattered among several containers at a port in southern Italy, destined for Moldova, in Eastern Europe. Because of improper paperwork, the inspectors started asking questions and determined that the shipment had come from China.
"The meat was officially destined for countries on the doorstep of the European Union and we knew that the chickens could be relabeled and illegally re-enter Italy for our consumption," Mr. Pantano said.
Although many countries attribute the spread of (A)H5N1 to migratory fowl, many ornithologists say the evidence often points to smuggling.
"We believe it is spread by both bird migration and trade, but that trade, particularly illegal trade, is more important," said Wade Hagemeijer, a bird flu expert at the Netherlands-based Wetlands International, which has been studying the role of migrating birds.
Although bird flu has now been detected on many farms in several African nations, there have been only a handful of reports of infections in wild birds on the continent, supporting the notion that trade is most important there.
"We're been looking for it in wild birds for the last two months and it is surprising that we've come up with zero," Dr. Lubroth said.
The effect of smuggling can sometimes be direct, when sick birds are smuggled onto farms. The virus strain found on the farms involved in Nigeria's first outbreak, in northern Kano State, closely matched those found on Chinese farms, Mr. Hagemeijer said.
Nancy Morgan, an economist at F.A.O., said smuggling could have easily introduced bird flu into Nigeria and Egypt, the two African countries with the most extensive bird flu problems.
"In developing countries, the border controls are marginal at best," she said. "As long as there's economic incentive, it will happen."
Producers in Egypt and Nigeria frequently import day-old chicks for about 20 cents a bird, she said, because it is easier to buy them than to master the delicate technology of hatching. In Nigeria, all the chicks were smuggled and therefore not inspected, because all imports were banned by the government to protect a young domestic industry.
Poultry products can also bring the virus into a country: infected chicken parts in feed or fertilizer, secondhand cages once used to house infected birds, or cheap meat that ends up being used on a farm or in a home where other birds are kept.
The main concern is China, a country with a serious bird flu problem.
General Borghini, the Italian medical officer, referring to a type of dark-skinned chicken that according to traditional Asian belief has medicinal properties, said, "Black chicken is our big, big headache."
Several months ago, health inspectors in Milan noticed that all the Chinese restaurants in Milan bought their poultry from a single distributor. When they conducted a surprise raid at the warehouse of the distributor, Euro Food International, they discovered three million packages of meat from China.
In the United States, Dr. Moore, of the Kansas State University, worries particularly about poorly regulated markets in live birds that cater to Muslims and Jews who want poultry slaughtered according to religious custom.
Photo: A Taiwanese inspector examining birds smuggled from China, which is the source of much of the live poultry and poultry products smuggled into Europe and Africa. China also has widespread bird flu cases. (Photo by Ting Chih-Kuan/Agence France-Presse -- Getty Images)(pg. A6)
Copyright (c) 2006 The New York Times. All rights reserved.
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