PARIS, France (Reuters) — Bird flu has been found in a French town outside a broad restriction zone.
The discovery is a setback to efforts to contain the outbreak of the disease, which has led a growing number of countries to ban poultry products from France.
The country, which is the European Union’s largest agricultural producer, has had 69 outbreaks of highly pathogenic bird flu in eight administrative departments in the southwestern part of the country since late November.
A case has now been found in Haute-Garonne, which is not included in the zone where the government has tightened sanitary measures and restricted movement of poultry since mid-December, a farm ministry official said Jan. 13.
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The zone includes Dordogne, Gers, Haute-Vienne, Landes, Pyrenees-Atlantiques, Hautes-Pyrenees, Lot, the whole of Gironde and Lot-et-Garonne and parts of the Correze and Charente departments.
However, the number of outbreaks has slowed in France since late December with only five outbreaks reported since the start of the year, the farm ministry said.
Avian flu cannot be transmitted to humans through food. Some viruses have infected humans, but initial results showed that the strains found in France posed no risk of being caught by humans, the ministry said.
More than a dozen countries, including Japan, which is the world’s largest importer of foie gras, imposed restrictions on French poultry products, live animals and hatching eggs after the bird flu outbreaks, which were found mainly in ducks and chickens.
Monique Eloit, the new director general of the World Organization for Animal Health, said the cause of the recent outbreaks in France remained uncertain, unlike previous ones in 2007 that could be linked to wild swans.
“There are high presumptions that these are strains that are not coming from wild birds but that have propagated below epidemic thresholds in palmipeds (ducks, geese) farms where the identification of these strains is far more difficult because there are no clinical signs,” Eloit said.
Eliot’s predecessor, Bernard Vallat, said last month that the emergence of three highly pathogenic strains in such a short time was unprecedented.
Eloit said one hypothesis is that low pathogenic strains had evolved into high pathogenic ones, and it showed the need for countries to monitor all types of bird flu strains, not only the highly pathogenic ones.
