SIR, I AM contacting you regarding avian flu, which I believe the government has been conned or bullied, or both into shifting the blame for bird flu from where it belongs - with the insensitive poultry industry and on to wild birds.

Broiler sheds are perfect breeding grounds for new and deadly viruses and there are any number of ways that they can spread across countries and continents.

At the same time, it is being repeatedly asserted that 2cooked chicken is 100pc safe to eat". This might be so, but how safe is it to handle the bodies of dead birds that are stored in millions of fridges?

The government and Ben Bradshaw on February 19 assured the public that the British poultry industry was "very well prepared" for avian flu and has "extremely high levels of bio security". However, the following day tons of poultry-shed waste was photographed dumped on agricultural land in Holmfirth, West Yorkshire.

Such waste is routinely spread on to fields all over Britain.

So it seems that the blame should really be with the intensive poultry industry and not wild birds that are being scapegoated for this unfortunate problem.

Alison Yates, address supplied