Bird flu farm 'continued exports'

[bluemoon24]

Lajos Bognar told Channel 4 some of the food was exported to Hungary - where the UK outbreak may have originated.



The government defended its handling of the situation, but said there had been a "lapse in bio-security" in Suffolk.



And Bernard Matthews, the company at the centre of the UK outbreak, has once again defended its conduct.



Mr Bognar said meat had left the Holton plant and arrived at Bernard Matthews' Hungarian site on either Wednesday or Thursday.



"I can say that from the protection zone, from the UK, six trucks arrived from there last week, to Hungary," he said.



The Bernard Matthews site at Upper Holton in Suffolk has both a farm and a poultry processing unit.



The farm was shut down immediately after the outbreak was suspected, but much of the processing business continued as usual.



That means cooked meat was transported from there across Britain and further afield - to countries including Hungary.



The Department of Agriculture Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) said their investigation would look at all movements.



But a Defra spokesman said exporting cooked poultry from an exclusion zone was allowed under European rules.



"It is possible that poultry product from the Suffolk plant could have met the licensing requirements for movement outside the restricted area," he said.



The virus is quickly destroyed by heat.



Voluntary suspension



Opposition politicians and some scientists say the government and Bernard Matthews need to be much more open about exactly what is coming and going from the infected premises.



A Bernard Matthews spokesman said on Thursday that it had voluntarily suspended all movements of its poultry products between the UK and its plant in Hungary.



A company spokesman said on Sunday night the statement still stood and movements were still suspended.



But the company is reported to have imported turkey from the country in the days after the outbreak, despite the government suspecting Hungary was the source of the disease.



Channel 4 News reported lorries had also left the British plant for Hungary under a special licence issued to Bernard Matthews and arrived there three or four days ago.



But it claimed the decision to grant the licence would have been made before it was clear poultry products, rather than wild birds, were the likely source of the outbreak.



It said Hungarian vets were due to get the results on Monday of tests carried out on processed meat transported from the UK to the country after the British bird flu outbreak.



Shop probe



Currently EU rules mean Hungary cannot export any poultry from a 10km zone around the bird flu-hit area - but anybody outside the zone can continue to trade.



The Food Standards Agency is continuing to investigate whether infected products are on shop shelves, and has said a recall is possible if evidence of contamination is found.



The H5N1 virus, which causes bird flu, does not pose a large-scale threat to humans as it cannot pass easily from one person to another.



But experts fear the virus could mutate at some point in the future and trigger a flu pandemic, potentially putting millions of human lives at risk.



Kaynak: SağlıkHaber