It’s a Fowl Day as Hong Kong Rescinds Ban

Why did 38,000 Chinese chickens cross the border? To get to the Hong Kong side now that the “bird flu” quarantine has been lifted.

After a six-week ban on live poultry imports--designed to wipe out the “bird flu” virus that killed six people--the first batch of mainland chickens was allowed into Hong Kong on Saturday.

Nearly 38,000 chickens were kept in quarantine for five days on the mainland side of the border while scientists tested blood samples to ensure that none of the chickens were carrying H5N1, a mysterious flu virus that caused an international scare after the six deaths late last year.

After crossing the border to Hong Kong, 13 more chickens from each truck were blood-tested before the truckload was released to wholesale markets.

“We have many orders from restaurants, hotels and markets,” said wholesaler Ho Cheuk Yin as workers slid stacks of orange plastic crates full of clucking chickens off the trucks. “But not half as many as last year. I think people are still not sure.”

The Hong Kong government reacted to the deaths--and an additional 12 cases of infection by a new strain of flu previously seen only in birds--by sealing the border on Dec. 24.

Every chicken in Hong Kong--1.4 million birds--was slaughtered in an effort to eliminate the virus.

The flu alarmed scientists because the Hong Kong cases were among the first confirmed examples of a virus leaping directly from birds to humans. Usually, viruses are passed from birds to pigs to people.

The migratory patterns of birds--and the potential of their droppings becoming “virus bombs”--raised the specter of a global epidemic of a new flu for which there is not yet a vaccine.

No new flu cases have been reported since the mass cull, but the World Health Organization said it is too early to declare victory.

“Although the outbreak is over in Hong Kong, the chicken flu threat will never be over,” said Dr. Daniel Lavanchy, who directed the WHO investigation in Hong Kong and China.

“It can reappear somewhere, someday,” he said from Geneva.

The flu appears to be transmitted through the air or through droppings, not by the ingestion of chicken meat. But fears of infection have caused Hong Kong diners to eschew even imported or frozen chicken.

Before the outbreak, China supplied Hong Kong with nearly 80,000 chickens a day. Now, with the supply cut in half, the price is expected to rise as much as 30%, wholesalers said.

“People are willing to pay more for chickens, but we have lost a lot of money in the last month, and we also have to buy new equipment,” said one seller, who said he was thinking of selling pigs instead.

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The government has compensated chicken farmers and sellers for their loss of business, but stringent new requirements are costly and time-consuming.

Even mainland chicken farms that supply Hong Kong must follow new hygienic standards, and the poultry must continue to pass health inspections before coming across the border.

Scientists originally suspected that the virus originated in China, the epicenter for many new flu strains, but they found no evidence of H5N1 there. They concluded that it must have come from Hong Kong’s own crowded, unhygienic markets.

Over the past six weeks, those markets have been scrubbed, sterilized and supplied with the plastic crates, which are easier to clean than the old wooden ones.

Authorities also broke up a “chicken mafia” that extracted a dollar per cage from sellers for “maintenance,” although wholesalers complained that these people did nothing and that the wooden cages were filthy.

Despite new regulations requiring workers who handle poultry to wear aprons, gloves and rubber boots, many at the Cheung Sha Wan Wholesale Market on Saturday were unloading the chickens from their fouled cages with bare hands.

Hong Kong’s own poultry farms and “chicken hotels,” where chickens stay on their way to market, remain closed because they failed recent hygiene tests.

Lessie Wei, the head of the government’s agriculture and fisheries department, said that the new tests and equipment will cost Hong Kong $1.92 million a year but that the government is determined to prevent another outbreak.