MILAN, Italy — Two vans of undercover police inspectors pulled up at a storefront in Milan in March, their target neither terrorists nor drugs.
Picking their way through a refrigerator at the back of a Chinese grocery store off a piazza, the agents found their quarry: bags of duck feet.
This followed a similar raid at a Milan warehouse a few months ago that yielded 3 million packages of chicken meat smuggled from China.
There is increasing evidence that a thriving international trade in smuggled poultry — including live birds, chicks and meat — is helping spread bird flu, experts say.
Poultry smuggling is a huge business that poses a unique threat: The (A) H5N1 bird flu virus is robust enough to survive not just in live birds but in frozen meat, feathers, bones and even on cages, though it dies with cooking. "No one knows the real numbers, but they are large," said Timothy E. Moore, director of federal projects at the National Agricultural Biosecurity Center at Kansas State University. "Behind illegal drug traffic, illegal animals are No. 2. And there is no doubt in my mind that this will play a prominent role in the spread of this disease." It looks to be the main way it is spreading in some parts of the world" along with the migration of wild birds.
Particularly when smuggled live, poultry can easily pass the disease onto birds in other countries. Though the risk of transmission in, say, infected frozen duck feet in a restaurant, is minimal, poultry parts can also spread the disease to birds when used as raw feed or in fertilizer on farms.
Poultry from bird-flu-infected countries has been banned in Europe since 2002, but smuggling seriously undermines those bans.
"In spite of the EU ban, we are still seizing Chinese poultry products," said Gen. Emilio Borghini, commander of the Military Police Health Service in Italy.
Many experts are convinced that the illegal import of infected live chicks introduced the virus into Nigeria. Its first cases were confirmed in February, but soon the virus appeared on poultry farms in multiple areas, leading to the widespread culling of birds in a country that can ill afford the loss. And yet, the disease has not been found in wild birds there.
In early April, Vietnamese health officials said chickens smuggled over the border from China had reintroduced bird flu into their nation, which had reported no cases for four months.
There is extensive smuggling between China and Africa.
Although many countries attribute the spread of (A)H5N1 to migratory fowl, many ornithologists say the evidence often points to smuggling. "We believe it is spread by both bird migration and trade, but that trade, particularly illegal trade, is more important," said Wade Hagemeijer, a bird-flu expert at the Netherlands-based Wetlands International, which has been studying the role of migrating birds.