To date there is no evidence of people having been infected through consumption of well cooked contaminated poultry or eggs.

Normal cooking temperatures, at 70°C or above at the centre of the product, inactivate the virus. Therefore, well cooked poultry meat is safe to consume. Eggs from infected birds can harbour the virus both outside and within the shell and should therefore be cooked before consumption.

The European Union and other countries in Europe are introducing import bans on live poultry animals and poultry products from areas with outbreaks of AI in poultry. These restrictions are put in place to avoid the potential introduction and spread of the disease among their own poultry flocks.

In areas with outbreaks in poultry, handling potentially contaminated frozen or thawed poultry meat before cooking can be hazardous if good hygienic practices are not observed. WHO recommends good hygiene practices to avoid spreading the virus through food handling:

• separate raw meat from cooked or ready-to-eat foods to avoid contamination: do not use the same chopping board or the same knife. Do not handle both raw and cooked foods without washing your hands in between and do not place cooked meat back on the same plate or surface it was on before cooking. Do not use raw or soft boiled eggs in food preparations that will not be heat treated/cooked.
• keep clean and wash your hands: after handling frozen or thawed raw chicken or eggs, wash thoroughly with soap your hands, surfaces and utensils that have been in contact with the raw meat.
• cook thoroughly: thorough cooking of poultry meat will inactivate the viruses. Either ensure that the poultry meat reaches 70°C or that the meat is not pink. Egg yolks should not be runny or liquid.

Experience from the current outbreaks in Asia shows that human cases of avian influenza infections are very rare and most of them have been linked to direct close exposure to dead or diseased poultry, notably during home-slaughtering, defeathering, eviscerating and preparation of raw poultry for cooking. Such activities should be avoided in areas with poultry outbreaks. The use of sick or dead animals for human or animal consumption must be forbidden since the home slaughtering process described above will spread large amount of viruses in the immediate environment and be hazardous to those present in the vicinity.

These recommendations, if properly explained and followed by rural populations in affected areas, would substantially contribute to reduce the risk of human exposure. In any case, in many countries in Europe, even if the current limited poultry outbreak should expand in the future, consumers are not likely to be exposed to raw contaminated poultry meat because of the way poultry is processed.