ISLAMABAD, 21 February 2006 — Pakistan has imposed complete ban on imports of poultry and live birds from India, Iran and France after the countries reported cases of H5N1 bird flu, officials said yesterday.
Authorities are to set up quarantine facilities on a newly opened rail link between India and Pakistan while 12 monitoring teams have fanned out across the country, the officials said.
“We have imposed a ban on poultry and live bird imports from India the day after the news from India,” Rana Mohammed Akhlaq, assistant animal husbandry commissioner at the Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Livestock, said.
“We have also banned poultry and birds from Iran and France as well because there are some cases in wildlife that have been detected there.” Health and agriculture officials decided on the ban after a meeting yesterday, a Health Ministry statement said.
India shares a long border with Pakistan to the east and a shorter frontier with Iran to the southwest.
India’s first H5N1 bird flu outbreak was confirmed on Saturday in western Maharashtra state, where according to officials 50,000 birds died last week. Hundreds of thousands of birds were being destroyed yesterday.
France announced on Saturday that tests on a dead wild duck confirmed the presence of the highly pathogenic strain of the virus, while Iran on the same day said 135 wild swans had also tested positive for H5N1.
Pakistan has not reported any cases of H5N1. But in 2003 it destroyed 3.5 million birds after an outbreak of the less virulent H9 and H7 forms of bird flu.
“Everybody is on red alert now after the disease broke out in neighboring countries,” said Mohammad Afzal, chief of animal sciences at the Pakistan Agriculture Research Council, which is linked to the Agriculture Ministry.
