Developments in the Bernard Matthews turkey H5N1 avian bird flu outbreak and slaughter move as rapidly as the virus is spreading across the European continent.
Barely receiving attention in the U.S. press, the British media reports frequently on the latest twists and turns in a story in which we still don’t know how the virus got to the Suffolk farm and where it came from. The British government’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs had the turkeys killed within a matter of days.
It’s still not known whether it was by accident or design the Bernard Matthews Company kept secret or plainly bungled the fact that turkey meat slaughtered in a Hungarian plant owned by the company was transported to its Suffolk facility just prior to the outbreak thereby possibly introducing the virus to the U.K.
The Guardian reports today that the “H5N1 bird flu strains found in Hungary and Britain are 99.96 percent genetically identical and almost certainly linked.” This may well be the smoking gun proving the virus spreads — not from wild birds to intensively raised birds — but from factory farm to factory farm.
On Thursday, February 8 The Guardian reported
A Whitehall source said there were concerns about bio-security at the processing plant, which lies adjacent to the Holton farm, where the infected birds were found. Officials from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) are looking at allegations that scraps of meat are sometimes left lying around the floor of the plant and are scavenged by rats and wild birds, creating a possible route for infection[emphasis added].
So, the reporting on this tragedy continues to develop. Avian bird flu is the latest in a decades long series of British food scandals. For example, there was the 2001 foot and mouth crisis which resulted in the killing of 6 million sheep, cows and pigs.
The most trenchant comment on this particular tragedy the Grumpy Vegan read is by a favored columnist, Simon Jenkins,
The reason why Whitehall [the British Government] acts with such speed, as over foot and mouth (which was not lethal, even to animals), is to protect the commercial interest of the industry. Hence its constant reference to EU [European Union] rules. Animals with diseases are unsellable abroad, so an outbreak can devastate the value of a national flock. Both the swift closing and the swift reopening of the Matthews factory were thus about money – and why not?
