Property damage and business interruption

6.2, bird flu

International: scientists investigating an outbreak of bird flu in a British flock of turkeys said there might be a link with an outbreak in Hungary in January. The UK government said there was a possible connection, contradicting statements by British officials in Brussels earlier that it was unlikely there was a Hungarian link. South Korea and Hong Kong joined a growing list of economies banning British poultry due to the country’s first outbreak of a deadly strain of bird flu in domestic poultry. Russia and Japan had already banned imports and the UK’s Financial Times reported that South Africa and Indonesia had followed suit. South Korea imported about US$3.0mn in poultry products from Britain last year. It will either cull or return 3,645 ducks imported for breeding that it had in quarantine in the country, the South Korean agriculture ministry said. South Korea’s major poultry import from Britain has been live ducks for breeding. Hong Kong, which imported 11,400 tonnes of British poultry and poultry products in the first 10 months of last year, also announced it would suspend the imports with immediate effect. Meanwhile, Indonesia’s death toll from the often lethal H5N1 strain of bird flu rose to 64 after independent laboratories confirmed blood samples from a 20-year-old woman. The confirmation was received from the Health Research and Development Health Agency and the Eijkman Molecular Biological Institute both based in Jakarta. This followed a statement from the Indonesian Health Ministry that two more people in Indonesia, a 15-year-old girl from an upscale Jakarta neighbourhood and a 30-year-old man in West Java, had caught bird flu. The girl, who lives in the capital’s Menteng district where many high ranking officials and foreign diplomats reside, had caught a wild bird which died two days later. South Korea confirmed a sixth case of bird flu despite the culling of poultry after earlier cases raising concerns that quarantine measures had failed to control the outbreak. The latest case occurred at a poultry farm in Ansong, Kyonggi Province, around 66km south of the capital, Seoul, and about 24km from Chonan, where the fifth case was found. At the same time, Hong Kong confirmed that two birds found in the city last week carried the H5N1 avian influenza virus, bringing the total number of birds officially declared to be infected this year to 10. The dead silver-eared mesias were discovered in Mong Kok area on February 7 and taken for tests, the Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department said.