U.S. Bans Poultry from British Columbia After Bird Flu Scare

WASHINGTON – The United States banned poultry from mainland British Columbia on Monday because of a case of bird flu, though Canadian officials said it wasn't the virulent form in Southeast Asia blamed for more than 60 human deaths.

The governments of Taiwan and Japan indicated they would take similar action.

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency said Sunday that a duck at a commercial poultry farm in British Columbia had tested positive for bird flu. The virus was a low-pathogenic North American form that doesn't kill poultry and is not a threat to people, officials said.

"We're waiting to get more information from Canada, at which point we could be able to scale back" the ban, said U.S. Agriculture Department spokesman Jim Rogers. "We just need that information."

Canadian officials plan to report to the U.S. within 24 hours, according to Canada's chief veterinary officer, Dr. Brian Evans.

Depending on the results, the U.S. could restrict imports from a smaller, regional area, Rogers said.

The farm with the infected duck, in Chilliwack outside of Vancouver, isn't licensed to export. Authorities have begun killing about 56,000 birds on the farm with carbon dioxide gas and have quarantined four other farms within three miles of the area.

An outbreak of bird flu in 2004 in British Columbia prompted the killing of 17 million birds.

Evans said Canada would have preferred that the U.S. take no action since the virus found in the duck is different from the one in Asia.

"That would have been consistent with how we've treated low-path findings in the United States previously," he said. "But again, we're working in an extremely sensitive international environment at this point."

The U.S. bans imports of poultry from any country where the high-pathogenic virus from Asia has been found. Those countries include Cambodia, Romania, China, Russia, Indonesia, South Korea, Japan, Thailand, Kazakhstan, Turkey, Laos, Vietnam and Malaysia.