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.