New Zealand has suspended 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 NZ$190 million (US$112 million) a year will be halted until New Zealand can prove it is free of bird flu again, Food Safety Minister Andrew Hoggard said Monday in Wellington.
“For commercial purposes we have to tell a number of countries that we are free of highly infectious bird flu,” Hoggard told Radio New Zealand. “Obviously we can no longer say that at the moment. As soon as we can say that again, we will work to get that trade back.
Biosecurity New Zealand has imposed strict controls on commercial egg farm movement after tests confirmed its chickens were infected with bird flu, but said it was not the strain of global concern.
New Zealand’s deputy director-general of biosecurity, Stuart Anderson, said in a statement that tests conducted at the mainland poultry farm identified a “highly infectious subtype of avian influenza (H7N6) virus.” “Although it is not the H5N1 variant circulating among wildlife around the world that is of concern, we take this discovery very seriously.”
Concerns about bird flu have increased with the spread of the H5N1 strain of the virus throughout American poultry and dairy farms. While most human infections with bird flu still occur among farmworkers who are exposed to infected animals, health officials are monitoring for any signs of the disease spreading among humans.
Anderson said the strain found on the New Zealand farm was “unlikely to be transmitted to mammals.”
He added that there were no reports of sick or dead birds on other poultry farms, and there were no concerns for human health or food safety.
Biosecurity New Zealand believes laying hens foraging outside the shed have been exposed to a low-pathogenicity virus from wild waterfowl, which can mutate when interacting with hens.
A 10-kilometre (six-mile) buffer zone has been put in place around the rural farm, in addition to restrictions preventing the movement of animals, equipment and feed. Hoggard said about 40,000 birds will be culled initially.
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