South Africa will ban poultry imports from Nigeria following an outbreak there of the deadly strain of the H5N1 bird flu, the first on the continent, the agriculture ministry said on Wednesday.
But Pretoria will not step up its precautionary measures as the outbreak remains far from Southern Africa, said agriculture ministry spokesperson David Tshabalala.
”We will ban any poultry products from Nigeria from entering South Africa,” Tshabalala said, adding that this is a standard rule of the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE).
The OIE reported earlier in Paris that tests in Italy had confirmed an outbreak of the H5N1 virus, which is highly dangerous for chickens, ducks and geese, and can be transmitted to humans in close proximity.
There have been 165 recorded human cases of H5N1 infection, 88 of them mortal, mostly in Asia, according to the World Health Organisation.
Tshabalala said the outbreak in Nigeria is not cause for immediate alarm.
”The geographical distance will give us time to do some proper planning,” he said. ”If we need to step up our quarantine process, that will be done.
”But it hasn’t even entered the SADC [Southern African Development Community] region and that is when we would really focus on eliminating the disease or stopping it from entering our borders.”
The 14-nation SADC groups South Africa and countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo and Tanzania further north.
South Africa, the world’s largest producer of ostrich meat, in 2004 culled thousands of ostriches in the Eastern Cape region following the outbreak of a less virulent strain of bird flu at two farms. It has since been declared bird-flu free.
SADC health ministers in November drew up a regional response plan for bird flu.
Zimbabwe suspended ostrich exports in December following an outbreak at two farms in southern Matabeleland province that tests conducted in South Africa showed were caused by the less virulent H5N2 strain.
Health officials in Malawi urged people not to eat meat from thousands of birds that dropped dead in the central Ntchisi district in mid-December, citing bird-flu fears, but tests conducted in South Africa on the Malawi birds turned up negative. — Sapa-AFP