Border flu checks delay first bird delivery for one day
Poultry fans hungry for a bite of fresh chicken may have to wait until Sunday - a day after the import ban is lifted, authorities said yesterday.
Hundreds of bird flu blood tests must first be carried out on the 38,000 live chickens expected to arrive from mainland farms on Saturday afternoon, which means most will only go on sale in retail markets the following day.
'They will all be going to Cheung Sha Wan market,' said Dr Les Sims, a senior veterinary officer at the Agriculture and Fisheries Department (AFD).
'Early on Sunday morning those birds will be distributed from Cheung Sha Wan to the retail markets.' Officers would be stationed at a laboratory at Man Kam To border checkpoint, set up to conduct H5N1 tests on 13 birds from each truckload.
'Given that this is quite an infectious disease, if this flock were infected with the virus - and this flock was checked five days ago [on the mainland] - we should see it spread through most of the birds,' Dr Sims said.
The tests would be carried out in four batches, with the first results known at around 3 pm and the last about midnight, Dr Sims said.
The mainland trucks were expected to reach the border early on Saturday afternoon. However, test results would only clear the chickens several hours later, so most retailers were expected to hold the chickens and only release them for sale on Sunday morning, Dr Sims said.
The department's assistant director, Liu Kwei-kin, had said at a press conference on January 23 that the chickens could enter Hong Kong and be in the markets by Saturday.
'Potentially, there could be some birds arriving in the markets earlier, but I suspect the vast majority won't be in the markets until early Sunday,' Dr Sims said.
Shenzhen Animal and Plant Quarantine Bureau deputy director Tan Guoying said yesterday that all 126 blood samples taken from a cross-section of the chickens due to arrive tomorrow had shown no trace of the H5N1 virus.
