15,000 chickens in Arkansas, belonging to food giant Tyson Foods, have been slaughtered after being identified as containing a highly pathogenic strain of the bird flu virus. I would avoid eating Tyson products for a while.

Japan is suspending imports of British poultry today as an English farm is shutdown due to an outbreak of the highly pathogenic bird flu virus. Birds are being culled and an area of ten kilometers is under containment to control the outbreak.

Both of these cases involve the H7 strain, not H5, although H7 is still transmissible to humans.

Concerning Tyson:

State officials say all the chickens exposed to a strain of the bird-flu virus at a Tyson Foods Inc. contract farm in northwest Arkansas have been killed and buried.
Jon Fitch, director of the state’s Livestock and Poultry Commission, says workers finished the job just after midnight Wednesday. Fitch says Tyson has provided more than 1,000 blood samples from other birds for testing, but no other exposures have been found.

It is still probably a good idea to make sure none of the infected birds made it to your grocery store shelf before the red flags went up. As for England:

“The Chief Veterinary Officer has confirmed that the strain of H7 avian influenza present in laying hens at the farm in Banbury is highly pathogenic,” the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said in statement.

Highly pathogenic means that the virus has a relatively high ability to produce disease.

Japan announced that it was suspending imports of poultry from Britain following the outbreak.

Officials near the affected farm have introduced measures meaning poultry within three kilometres (1.9 miles) of the farm must be isolated from wild birds and bird gatherings and movement of birds are banned within 10 kilometres.

The farmer at the centre of the recent outbreak said in a statement distributed by the National Farmers’ Union that it had been a “devastating” 24 hours.

Read about Arkansas: Arkansas: All chickens exposed to bird-flu killed.
Read about England: Bird flu outbreak ‘highly pathogenic’: officials.