Smash hit

"We want to stress that this is not a food safety issue," insisted Mr Bennett.

"The British poultry industry is a highly professional and successful business worth £1.674 billion and producing high quality fresh products."

But today a bird flu death in Thailand was blamed on eating infected meat, rather than contact with diseased birds. Bang-on Benphat, a 48 year-old farmer from the Kanchanaburi province of Thailand, died yesterday after eating his neighbour's diseased chickens on Sunday.

Initial tests failed to show the virus but today the Thai Prime Minister, Thaksin Shinawatra, confirmed the cause of death.

"The guy was infected with bird flu because he took a sick chicken, slaughtered it and then ate it," Mr Thaksin told a news conference in Bangkok. The farmer's seven-year-old son has also been hospitalised with pneumonia-like symptoms, although he has not yet tested positive for bird flu.

Today European health ministers were meeting in Hertfordshire to discuss their plans for coping with a possible pandemic of a human strain of bird flu.

The informal two-day conference in Chandler’s Cross is being attended by European Commissioner for Health Markos Kyprianou and Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt.

Chief Medical Officer Sir Liam Donaldson said that NHS contingency plans to deal with a bird flu pandemic were being prepared.

Sir Liam said a pandemic was "inevitable", but told BBC Breakfast: "We’ve ordered a stockpile of two and a half million doses of vaccine against the current strain of bird flu, which is a contingency, but we’re going to scale up capacity with manufacturers so that when we identify the exact strain, the exact vaccine can be manufactured much quicker then would be the case."

He added: "We’re asking all local NHS services to produce a plan (about dealing with a pandemic) and we’re going to audit that. We’re going to make sure they’ve thought of all of these issues - the intensive care beds, the extra GP appointments - that might be needed. So we are planning very very actively even though at this stage there’s no sign of the pandemic arriving."

The Health Protection Agency says it is to co-ordinate an EU-wide simulation exercise to see how well organisations would cope in the event of a flu pandemic. Dates and details of the exercise are not being announced to make it as realistic as possible.

The Department of Health estimates that 25 per cent of the population - 15 million people - may fall sick during a pandemic. About 25 per cent of the working population may need to take sick leave of between five and eight working days over the pandemic - the equivalent of between 5-7 per cent of the workforce.

Health experts predict that between two million and 50 million people could die globally if the strain mutated.

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