New Zealand has halted all poultry exports after the first case of bird flu was confirmed at an egg farm in the South Otago region.
Exports of poultry products worth about A$190 million ($112 million) a year will be halted until New Zealand can be certified free of bird flu, Food Safety Minister Andrew Hoggard said in Wellington on Monday.
“For trade purposes we have to say to many countries that we are free of highly pathogenic avian influenza,” Hoggard told Radio New Zealand. “Obviously, we can’t say more at the moment. When we are able to say that again, we will be working to restore that trade.”
Biosecurity New Zealand has put strict movement controls in place at a commercial egg farm after tests confirmed its chickens were infected with bird flu, but said it was not a strain of global concern.
Tests at free-range Mainland Poultry identified “a highly pathogenic H7N6 subtype of bird flu,” Biosecurity New Zealand deputy director Stuart Anderson said in a statement. “Although the type of H5N1 circulating in wildlife around the world is not the cause of concern, we are taking the discovery seriously.”
Concerns about bird flu have increased as the H5N1 strain of the virus has spread through poultry and dairy farms in the US. Although most human infections of avian flu continue to occur in farm workers exposed to infected animals, health officials are looking for signs of its spread to humans.
Anderson said the strain found on the New Zealand farm “will not be transmitted to mammals”.
No sick or dead birds have been reported at other poultry farms, and there are no concerns about human health or food safety, he said.
Biosecurity New Zealand believes laying hens grazing outside the shed were exposed to a low-pathogenic virus from waterfowl, which can mutate through interaction with hens.
A 10 kilometer (six mile) zone has been put in place around the farm, as well as restrictions preventing the movement of animals, equipment and feed. Hoggard said that around 40,000 birds will be killed initially.
