Britain:The UK government's chief scientist said yesterday that packaged turkey meat might have to be removed from supermarket shelves in a mass product recall, as the official inquiry into a bird flu outbreak at a Suffolk farm in eastern England widened.
The frank admission by Sir David King came as the government's Food Standards Agency (FSA) confirmed that it is looking at the possibility that bird flu has entered the human food chain.
The FSA is examining how the disease infected turkeys at the Bernard Matthews plant.
Sir David's comments appeared to be at odds with the FSA's insistence that it has no plans at present to recall turkey products. But it became clear yesterday that some supermarkets are already on standby to react to such an emergency.
Efforts to maintain consumer confidence in turkey and poultry appeared to have failed as supermarket Sainsbury's reported a 10 per cent slump in sales.
The store said: "We have seen a dip of approximately 10 per cent in our poultry sales figures as a whole for the past five days, compared to the same days last week. The situation is, however, evolving all the time and the recent bad weather has also been a factor in the drop in sales." Supermarket giant Tesco also reported a fall of up to 9 per cent earlier this week.
Ministers' hopes that public fears about the crisis would have died down less than a week after the discovery of the H5N1 strain at the Suffolk plant faded as details of a three-pronged official investigation into bio-security at the plant emerged, with fears that the disease might have spread into the wild bird population.
Sir David said packaged turkey meat might now be removed from supermarket shelves. "I think that is exactly what the Food Standards Agency will be looking at now," he said.
He also warned ministers that avian flu could have been passed in the last week to the British wild bird population via imported infected meat from Hungary, opening up the possibility that it could spread throughout Britain.
- (Guardian service)