Bird flu tit for tat

This is a small taste of what it will be like.

Columbia notified the international body that oversees global animal health that it had an outbreak of low pathogenic avian influenza. Immediately five countries (Bolivia, Ecuador, Panama, Peru and Venezuela) halted imports of Colombian poultry (AP).

You'd think they would be praised. But no. The argument was that Columbia risked damage to the Latin American poultry industry with its notification, which, although of no public health significance, raised public fears.

Colombia "didn't even have to report this low pathogenic virus," said Dr. Richard Lee, a bird-flu expert and professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo. But the reaction by Colombia's neighbors, he said, was "not justified."

Yanzhong Huang, a bird-flu specialist who heads the Center for Global Health Studies at Seton Hall University in the United States, said the action by Colombia's neighbors might confuse the public if the poultry bans are long-term.

"It could reinforce the misperception that you could catch flu by eating fowl," Huang said. Experts say no one has caught bird flu from eating properly cooked poultry.

Maybe Columbia didn't have to report it, but it was the responsible thing to do. Now they are being punished and will serve as an object lesson to other countries in the region: shut up about your bird flu problems.

But the damage didn't stop there. Columbia retaliated by halting rice imports from Bolivia and Ecuador, ostensibly on the grounds that "migratory birds land in rice fields" (no one has ever suggested you could get flu or transmit it through rice).

A small example of what the bird flu problem can do. Just watch.