UK minister defends decision to allow poultry imports

British Secretary for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs David Miliband has defended the British government's handling of Hungar-ian poultry imports after a bird flu outbreak in Suffolk, as ministers admitted the disease might have entered human food.

Ministers are under growing pressure to introduce tighter controls on poultry coming into the UK until it finds out how the outbreak started.

The National Farmers' Union and the government's chief scientist, Professor Sir David King, say an import ban should be considered, and a leading virology expert expressed surprise on Sunday that such imports had been allowed.

Investigators, who are now focusing on turkey meat legally imported from an area of Hungary outside an exclusion zone as the possible source of infection, are still trying to determine whether any contaminated food from the Bernard Matthews factory farm has been on sale in Britain.

Under EU rules Hungary cannot export poultry from a 10km zone around the infection site, but can export meat from elsewhere. Bernard Matthews, which said last week it had suspended all movements of poultry between the UK and its plant in Hungary, imported turkey from the country three days after the outbreak arose.

Miliband said on Sunday that a ban on imports would breach EU rules and might provoke retaliation against the British poultry industry.

When asked why the government had not stopped imports from Hungary, he said: "That would be in contravention to the EU free trade rules. If we had done that, the EU would have taken a very dim view of what we had done and may well have taken measures against us."

Miliband told the BBC's Sunday AM program that he would have imposed a ban if vets had told him that this was a "sensible" step to protect public health.

But John Oxford, professor of virology at Bart's Hospital in London, said he was "bemused" by the response.

"I wouldn't have thought that they would allow the import of turkey pieces from a country -- that is, Hungary -- where they have already had an outbreak of H5N1," he said.