Thai cabinet lunches on chicken to calm fears Wednesday, 21 January 2004 03:22

BANGKOK: Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra invited foreign reporters to join his cabinet for a chicken lunch yesterday as he tried to soothe public fears after an outbreak of poultry cholera. BANGKOK: Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra invited foreign reporters to join his cabinet for a chicken lunch yesterday as he tried to soothe public fears after an outbreak of poultry cholera.
“Come and join us. Are you scared?” Thaksin called out as the cabinet sat down in the dining room of Government House to a lunch of Hainanese chicken rice, roast chicken and spicy chicken soup as well as raw salmon and octopus.
“It’s the best chicken in the world, Thai chicken,” he said. “This is exactly what we export to Japan. It’s very good. It’s safe.”
Thailand insists it is free of the bird flu which has jumped to humans in Vietnam and killed at least five people there, but the cholera outbreak has dented confidence in a major export industry that raises one billion chickens each year.
Many Thais are shunning chicken, hence the cameras watching the cabinet eat a range of poultry dishes, even though experts say poultry cholera cannot skip to humans, unlike bird flu.
South Korea, Japan and Taiwan have also reported outbreaks of bird flu. Since November, almost 900,000 chickens have died in Thailand, 29,746 of them confirmed to have been killed by cholera and respiratory problems and the rest culled because they showed symptoms of the disease.
Thai chicken exporters are worried the cholera outbreak will hurt sales to major importers Japan and Europe. But a senior European Union official said he saw no signs of a consumer backlash in Europe.

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