RIYADH, 29 January 2004 — Saudi Arabia has banned the import of poultry meat and products as well as live birds and hatching eggs from a number of Asian countries because of fears over bird flu.
A spokesman for the Ministry of Commerce and Industry said the meat ban covered South Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, China, Japan, Pakistan and Indonesia. The Ministry of Agriculture has separately banned the import of birds, hatching eggs and chicks from South Korea, Thailand, China, Japan, Vietnam and Pakistan.
The agriculture ministry has also begun inspection visits to poultry farms in the Riyadh region as a precautionary measure against bird flu. Though the virus has not been detected on the Kingdom’s 110 poultry farms, the ministry has begun distributing vaccines and advising farmers about the flu symptoms and remedial measures to be adopted, an official at the Agriculture Ministry told Arab News.
The official said inspection visits had shown that some management practices needed to be changed. Asked whether the ministry was conducting laboratory tests to detect virus among imported frozen chicken, the official said the ministry’s labs were not equipped to do so.
“We have to depend on Germany and other countries to conduct such tests. The required equipment is costly and beyond the ministry’s budget so we have the tests conducted in Western labs,” the official explained.
Meanwhile, Dr. Tariq Madani, the head of the Anti-Contamination Committee for Haj at the Ministry of Health, has stated that the possibility of bird flu transferring from bird to human is low and that there had been no contamination from frozen or dead birds.
According to a spokesman at the Thai Embassy in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia last year imported $2.3 million worth of poultry.
