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Australian authorities have ordered on Wednesday the destruction of some 24,000 ducks in Victoria to contain the spread of the avian flu detected in the southern region of the country.
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Reports of new cases of bird flu prompted Japan, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Singapore and Vietnam to prohibit the entry of Australia's poultry products into their ports, a move called by the Australian Chicken Foundation as overreaction.
Foundation executive director Andreas Dubs said that the ban was unnecessary as the virus' spread was limited and has been largely suppressed.
"This is limited to two farms, one of which has already been depopulated of ducks and the other is in the process," Dubs was quoted by Reuters as saying.
The infected farms were located in eastern Melbourne, Dubs added.
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Also, a statement issued by the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry downplayed the risk carried by the latest bird flu incident, stressing that the Victoria strain was not as deadly as H5N1 strain first seen in 1997.
"The risk to human health is negligible ... on occasions, low pathogenic avian influenza is detected in wild birds in Australia ... This is not an unusual occurrence," the ministry statement reiterated.
Dubs further explained that while the virus could prove devastating to poultry stocks, authorities have already declared that the Victoria cases will not endanger public health or pose any risk to food supplies.
It appears too that the spread of the virus has been limited on the farms where most of ducks were ordered destroyed.
"There's no reason to believe that there are any infections elsewhere ... and there's obviously no danger to humans," Agence France Presse (AFP) reported Dubs as saying.
The Foundation also decried the reaction of the Japanese government to the incident, which ordered a full ban of Australian poultry products on January 27. but Dubs is optimistic that ban will be lifted soon enough.
"It is often the case that a country might over-react a little at the first news ... and I think that might be the case with Japan, that the initial reaction is to stop everything and hopefully, in due course, a few days, those limitations might be lifted," Dubs told ABC.
