AS a new case of Newcastle Disease was confirmed in Northern Ireland yesterday, Department of Agriculture vets in the Republic were hoping for a continuation of the south westerly winds.
The wind direction over the past week has been a major factor in preventing the spread of the highly contagious disease from the North, where there have been 10 confirmed cases of the fowl pest, which has led to the deaths of 570,000 chickens since February 6th.
Veterinary officials in the Republic said that a combination of voluntary vaccination of the breeding stock south of the Border, and the gales from the southwest, will help prevent an outbreak in the Republic.
Northern Ireland officials, who placed a 10km exclusion zone around the site of the latest outbreak near Dungiven, Co Derry, believe the disease was brought into the North by wild birds migrating from eastern Europe.
An emergency vaccination programme for poultry stocks, which was ordered there last week, has begun. But it will be some time before every bird is safe from fowl pest, Northern agriculture officials said.
A dispute has broken out between the small animal rights organisation, the Campaign for the Abolition of Cruel Sports, and the national gunclub movement, the NARGC, over the CACS's call for a clampdown on the release of game birds into the wild.
It called on the Government to clamp down on gunclubs and gamekeepers, and force them to vaccinate the wild game birds they are releasing, because they are very subject to disease and are likely to spread it.
But a spokesman for the National Association of Regional Game Councils denied the charges. He said the CACS is totally ignorant in such matters because reared birds are not even being hatched at this stage of the year, and releases do not take place until late summer or early autumn.
Meanwhile, the Department of Agriculture said it could not confirm reports at the weekend that a third consignment of Irish poultry had been sent back from Sweden because of salmonella levels.
It said that neither could it confirm rumours that the Swedish authorities are about to ban Irish poultry.
A Department spokesman said that it had examined two recently returned shipments of poultry from Sweden and discovered low levels of salmonella in them. It was continuing to investigate where the stocks had been held in Sweden.
However, he pointed out that the Swedish authorities had sought a derogation from EU regulations on salmonella in fowl to put in place much higher standards of testing for it.
Poultry producers in France and the Netherlands have complained that the Swedes are using their health regulations to protect their local poultry industry from outside competition.