VANCOUVER - Documents obtained by CBC News suggest public health officials were kept in the dark in the early days of B.C.´s avian flu outbreak.Correspondence received under the Freedom of Information Act shows concerns over a breakdown in communications between government agencies.

On February 20 health and agriculture officials sat together to announce their strategy to contain an avian flu outbreak among flocks in Abbotsford.

But that apparent co-operation belied the tension between health departments and agriculture officials.

On that same day, the director of the B.C. Centre for Disease Control wrote a letter to the head of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. In it, he complained of not being informed soon enough about the alarming number of chickens dying from the virus.

The letter goes on to say that the delay "could have had severe consequences" in evaluating any risks to humans.

• LINK: Read the avian flu documents obtained by CBC News here (pdf file)

Another letter, this one by Dr. Perry Kendall, B.C.´s provincial health officer, is equally as critical. In it Kendall says agriculture officials were witholding critical information about the virus until their minister saw it first.

"We wanted to be sure that public health matters were adequately taken into account in terms of minimizing whatever remote risk their was of this sort of virus moving from chickens to humans," he explains.

Kendall says he is satisfied the communication breakdown won磘 happen in the future.

The CFIA isn磘 commenting on the matter. Officials say they磖e working on a report that addresses the complaints.