By Sybille de La Hamaide
PARIS, April 27 (Reuters) - Trade bans on pork products on fears they may transmit flu are unjustified as the disease was not found in pigs and even if it was, flu cannot be transmitted by eating meat, the World Animal Health body said on Monday.
Only proofs that the virus is spreading in pigs in zones of countries having human cases would justify trade measures on the importation of pigs from these countries, it said.
Outbreaks of the H1N1 virus which has killed 149 people in Mexico and spread to the United States, Canada and Spain, have prompted several countries to impose bans on pig meat imports.
China said on Monday it had banned imports of live pigs and pork products from Mexico and three U.S. states, following Russia's move on Sunday to place curbs on meat imports from North and Latin America. [ID:nPEK2499
"It is important to reaffirm that pork consumption is not blamed at all in the transmission of this disease," the head of the Paris-based OIE Bernard Vallat told Reuters in an interview.
"Otherwise it will lead consumers to change their habits and provoke unjustified economic disruption," he said, stressing that it was "unfair to ban imports just because there are cases of human flu."
Vallat said the bans did not rely on international sanitary norms recognised by the OIE and the World Trade Organisation but stressed that countries nevertheless had a right to ask for information from an infected exporting country.
Fears there could be a global flu pandemic which would hurt fragile world economies has led to a broad-based decline in stocks, oil and other commodity markets.
NO LINK FOUND BETWEEN PIG AND PEOPLE
The World Health Organization has also ruled out any risk of infection from consuming pork, saying swine flu has not been shown to be transmissible to people through eating properly handled and prepared pork, or other products derived from pigs.
The flu virus is killed by cooking temperatures of 70 degrees Celsius (160 degrees Fahrenheit), in line with general guidance for cooking pork safely, the WHO said.
The OIE, an intergovernmental organisation of 174 member states, also stressed that no pig, in Mexico or elsewhere, had been found with the disease and that there was no proof so far of a transmission from pig to human.
"We have found no link at all, at least for the moment, between an infected animal and an infected person," Vallat said, saying that the precise origin of the virus was therefore still unknown.
The OIE stressed that the virus should not be called "swine flu" as it also contains avian and human components.
"It is a cocktail of pig, bird and human viruses, that's why we think it is inappropriate to call it swine flu," Vallat said.
Instead, the organisation suggested calling it "North-American influenza", a name based on its geographic origin just like the Spanish influenza, another human flu pandemic with animal origin that killed more than 50 million people in 1918-1919.