Phillip Whitehead (PSE). – Mr President, my group in the Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety endorses the approach of our draftsman Mr Sturdy, not least in his encomia for the general rapporteur Mr Parish, and for the Commissioner and his emphasis throughout on studied vigilance rather than either hysteria or complacency. We salute him for that.

The six questions that the Commissioner sent to the Community health ministers seem to me to be the right ones, but the question remains as to whether he gets the right answers from them in terms of the way we can mobilise our stocks of anti-virals prior to the development of a vaccine.

I would just say in passing to Dr Matsakis, whom I greatly esteem, that I do not share his relative happiness with the outcome of the events of 1918. In 1918, death was the firewall that put an end to it; the virus ran out of victims. We cannot be in a situation where we allow that to happen again, and I therefore salute the measures the Commissioner has taken.

I have just got time for one question: if low pathogen avian flu is also infectious and can mutate, how can we be certain that the import of infected wildfowl and domestic poultry is really under control? In my own country we have had examples of both the former and now today the latter. Large stocks of illegally imported Chinese chicken meat have been uncovered in the UK over the past few days. We know that epidemics run through channels of illegality and deceit – epidemics, not pandemics. Epidemics start that way, so it was with foot and mouth disease. We do not want to see it again and so I hope the Commissioner will be able to say in his summing-up exactly what the measures of preventive scrutiny will be.