BBC NEWS | UK | Avian flu found in parrot in UK
BBC NEWS | UK | Avian flu found in parrot in UK
Quote: A parrot that died in quarantine in the UK has tested positive for avian flu, the government has said.
A highly pathogenic H5 strain of the disease has been found, but it is not known if it is the H5N1 variant which has killed at least 60 people in Asia.
Because the bird – imported from south America – was in quarantine, the UK’s disease-free status is not affected.
This is a topic that scares me… The bird flu has great potential to be a HUGE pandemic event, and I’m thinking chances are that it’s a matter of time, not so much a matter of chance…
The good news is that the bird was being imported into the UK - it wasn’t already there. The bad news is that the bird was from South America, which wasn’t (to my knowledge) on the list of places where we already knew the bird flu was…
Although that middle paragraph does give hope that maybe it’s a different strain—in which case, this story is really useless…
Still, all and all, rather disturbing, although I think this particular story only made news because of the media hype…