Markets selling live birds must be closed
Back in 1997 tragedy struck several families in our community when six people died after contracting H5N1 bird flu virus.
Virologists from the World Health Organisation as well as leading experts at universities in Hong Kong warned that the problem of bird flu would persist in our city as long as we continued to import and trade in live chickens.
Since then there have been several instances of mass infections among locally grown and imported livestock where tens of thousands of birds were returned to farms on the mainland or culled here, and yet the Health, Welfare and Food Bureau still has not addressed the problem head-on. It has ignored the advice of experts to ban the trade of live poultry in Hong Kong.
I know that people involved in the trade stand to lose jobs, but the life of even just one person is too high a price to pay. Workers involved could possibly engage in the trade of chilled and frozen birds.
Every new outbreak increases fears of a possible epidemic as humans do not have immunity to the virus.
It is not comforting to hear Secretary for Health, Welfare and Food Yeoh Eng-kiong say that there is no immediate risk of a pandemic and the government is on top of the problem.
I would like to see our government taking the advice that has been given to it and closing all markets with live birds in Hong Kong even if it means angering the few grandmothers who insist on shopping for live birds for dinner.
MARIAN SCHNEPS
Repulse Bay
