The past day or two or three have been a mad-dash scramble of officials in Romania, desperately lashing out at the demon of bird flu in order to demonstrate competency on the cusp of EU ascension pronouncements. Today, Brussels is expected to issue its findings about reforms in Romania and Bulgaria which will send a clear signal as to whether or not the countries will officially join the European Union on the preferred date of 1 January 2007. Various politicians in Romania have been very bullish on prospects of on-time acceptance and I have to admit I thought it was pretty much a slam-dunk.

Just recently came a kink in the works. Bird flu reared its ugly head in the county of Braşov, when a substantial outbreak was discovered.

The poultry farmers appear to have engaged in an active cover-up of bird flu which has resulted in hundreds of rotting chicken carcasses. The leadership of Romania have realized this scandal has the chance to be a magic bullet to undo all their hard-fought changes, so they’ve sprung into action in order to show Europe they have the fortitude to crack down on offenders and muscle in a modicum of public safety.

And the wheels are in motion since discovering the disgusting conditions of a significant poultry farm in the town of Codlea which is less than a 10 mile drive from here. From online news sources, it looks like 15 tons of potentially compromised chicken had already been selling in the markets of 10 different counties (including the capital, Bucureşti). Basically, if you’ve bought your chicken from a chain store like Selgros or Luca, the chances of your chicken being infected increase substantially. Nearly 20,000 eggs have been confiscated as part of the public health measure to quarantine the H5 avian virus. The village of Hurez and the town of Fagaraş are under lockdown. Several thousands of doses of Tamiflu (with its active ingredient oseltamivir being highly questionable) have been distributed in the county of Braşov.

Health workers disinfect the cars leaving the quarantine zones.
(Photo and story by Alecs Iancu.)

There are four issues at play here.

First and foremost (at least, to you and me), is the quick response of Romania’s leaders to take decisive action to contain the threat and avert a public health disaster. Really, it’s impressive that all resources appear to be mobilized to diagnose and stop a nightmare.

Secondly (and let’s be realistic), much of the rapid fire action is due to concerns about politicians getting egg on their face on the eve of certain victory in the EU ascension process. Akin to the American state ratification process of yesteryear, European nations desiring to enter the union have to jump through a series of legislative hoops before their state can be ratified as a colleague of the greater pan-europa commonwealth. The DA alliance has managed to effectively steer Romania towards success despite the petty squabbling along the way and it would a major faux pas for them to not bring force to bear on this issue when they are essentially crossing the finish line. Failure to demonstrate competency would likely result in a quick shuffling of papers in Belgium where the outcome would be changed to be negative.

Thirdly (as always), there is the economic consquence. So far, officials seem highly reluctant to specifically name those stores and brands which are likely to have the tainted chicken. Instead, it seems they prefer to keep the actual data on the downlow and simply direct government employees to seize goods. No one wants to be the one pointing a finger specifically at Metro or Angst because they fear a public backlash where shoppers might refuse to patronize those companies in the future. I don’t share the fear of the corporate managers who are afraid of a little negative PR. It’s my humble opinion that it might be better to advise people to simply throw away their chicken and eggs if they bought from any of the companies in the past 10 days. All the companies would be equally embarrassed and presumably food safety (and not consumer revenge) would be the spirit of things. Contrarily, I guess one could be jaded enough to think all the US-Romania cooperation of late has included learning from the chicken business of Tyson Foods.

Lastly, there will be the criminal investigations into the affair. Probes into how the Sibiu regional agricultural authority managed to approve the supposedly sanitary conditions of the primary farm in question only a scant two months ago despite repeated citations for bio-security violations. Inquiries into who failed to enforce laws mandating a veterinarian be on staff, when the farm had none. And questions to follow up on new PSD accusations that national Minister of Agriculture Gheorghe Flutur may possibly have had financial relationships with the offending companies.

As for me, I regret my otherwise delicious chicken pizza which was cooked at home last night. And, yeah, I think I might actually not buy any chicken or eggs for a couple/few days until some of this blows over and the public health folks have had a chance to remove potentially deadly products from the stores around here.

What, you wouldn’t do the same?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 16th, 2006 at 1:43 pm and is filed under Living, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.