The European Commission imposed an EU-wide ban on the import of chicken meat from Thailand yesterday, amid fears of spreading an outbreak of avian influenza.
The Minister for Agriculture and Food, Mr Walsh, announced he had taken all necessary steps to comply with the ban. He emphasised there was a negligible risk to humans from eating chicken. The only real risk to human health was from direct contact with infected birds.
The Thai authorities announced yesterday that a chicken butcher aged 56 had died of pneumonia. Two boys had contracted avian flu.
Ireland's European Commissioner, Mr David Byrne, is in Thailand on a long-planned visit to look at improvements to food safety. He said: "Given the seriousness of potential risk for Europe, we have to ban Thai poultry imports immediately. We cannot take any risks with public health or animal health."
The EU does not import live chickens from Thailand. The ban will apply only to meat slaughtered after January 1st and an exemption will be given for meat that has been heat-treated.
The EU imported 120,000 tonnes of poultry meat from Thailand in 2002 and 137,000 tonnes in the first 11 months of last year. Irish poultry meat production reached 124,000 tonnes in 2001.
But Thai chicken meat amounts to only 12 per cent of EU imports, which totalled 961,000 tonnes in 2001. The imports are dwarfed by the EU's domestic production of 9.1 million tonnes.
EU officials said the risk to human health was slight. They left the impression that the Commission was imposing the ban to prevent the image of European poultry meat being harmed.