OTTAWA: The outbreak of bird flu in Ontario has prompted the Kingdom to temporarily ban the import of poultry products from the Canadian province.
“The ban would continue until the situation there gets back to normal,” a Saudi Food and Drug Authority (SFDA) official said.
He, however, added that poultry products from other regions in Canada that are thermally processed and certified as free of bird flu will be allowed.
The Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) confirmed the presence of H5 avian influenza on farms in Oxford County, Ontario.
The CFIA said: “Earlier, Hong Kong, Uruguay, Japan and Taiwan had restricted imports citing bird flu outbreak.”
The Kingdom, the second-largest importer of chicken broiler meat in the world, earlier imposed a similar ban on poultry imports from Taiwan in February and Thailand in March.
This avian virus, popularly known as bird flu, is the highly pathogenic H5N2 strain.
Besides Ontario, it was discovered last December in the western Canadian province of British Columbia and has also been reported this year in the US states of Arkansas, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, Oregon, South Dakota, Washington and Wisconsin.
