Poultry smuggling undermines bird flu precautions
Posted on 14 April 2006
Last month, two vans of police inspectors, undercover in jeans and sneakers, pulled up at a storefront near the Piazza Morselli in Milan on a sensitive raid, a matter of national well-being and security. Their target was not terrorists, weapons or drugs. It was smuggled Asian poultry - a product at risk for carrying bird flu.
While sorting through a refrigerator at the back of the Chinese grocery store, the inspectors found their quarry: bags of unlabeled refrigerated duck feet that General Emilio Borghini, head of the Military Police Health Service, deemed "suspicious."
A similar raid at a warehouse here a few months ago yielded three million packages of chicken meat smuggled from China in unmarked packages, even though such imports have been banned in the European Union since 2002.
There is increasing evidence, experts say, that a thriving international trade in smuggled poultry products - including birds, chicks, eggs, meat, feathers and other products - is making a substantial contribution to the spread of the H5N1 bird flu virus.
Poultry smuggling turned out to be a huge and previously largely overlooked business, perhaps second only to narcotics in international contraband, experts and government officials believe.
