Exports of chicken meat to Hong Kong were blocked last week after a case of bird flu was found on a farm in the Alentejo.
But the shock discovery has been played down by health inspectors, who say: “It was one case, in one chicken” – and indeed Brussels has declared that Portugal has acted “correctly” in the situation.
“The virus was identified in a regular control and 63 birds on the farm were destroyed while a restricted perimeter of a kilometre was set up around the property,” a community source is reported to have told Lusa news agency.
The variant of bird flu was described as a “low pathogen virus of subtype H7”.
