UAE bans select poultry products from Sweden

The UAE has banned select poultry products from Sweden, it was announced on Monday.

“MoCCAE has banned the import of all kinds of live domestic and wild birds, ornamental birds, chicks and hatching eggs and their thermally not treated products from Sweden,” the Ministry of Climate Change and Environment, in an announcement on Twitter, said.

Sweden has culled 3,200 turkeys after finding bird flu, authorities said last week, effectively bringing to a halt the country's poultry exports to markets outside the EU for at least three months.

The slaughter follows a series of outbreaks of bird flu in Europe in the last few weeks, with wild birds suspected to be spreading the disease.

“So far we only have one infected farm in Sweden, but we don’t know how much of the virus we have in wild fauna...so there is of course the risk of another farm getting infected,” Katharina Gielen, a department head at the Swedish Board of Agriculture, told Reuters.

#___ #MoCCaE pic.twitter.com/LLk2OranbQ

— MoCCAE (@MoCCaEUAE) November 23, 2020