“Eat chicken!”
That declaration was made by the French agriculture minister yesterday after France confirmed its first avian-flu case in a dead duck.
“The first step consumers can take in solidarity with chicken farmers is not to stop eating chicken,” Dominique Bussereau told Europe 1 radio.
“If after this broadcast you had a bit of time to eat some chicken, that would be a very good thing.”
France, Europe’s biggest poultry producer, confirmed that a duck found dead near Lyon – in a region famous for the quality of its chickens – had the H5N1 avian-flu strain, which has killed at least 91 people since late 2003.
French President Jacques Chirac urged calm, and Bussereau sought to assure consumers that no case had been found on a French poultry farm.
In other developments, farm workers slaughtered 50,000 chickens in western India yesterday, a day after the country’s first outbreak of avian flu.
Some 500,000 more birds will be slaughtered.
In St. Louis, bad news about the spread of bird flu emerged at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Human beings risk being overrun by diseases from the animal world, said researchers who have documented 38 illnesses that have made that jump over the past 25 years.
There are 1,407 pathogens that can infect humans, said Mark Woolhouse of the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. Of those, 58 percent come from animals.