Hong Kong has banned egg imports from Cambodia due to the country’s recent avian influenza outbreak, which claimed four lives last month.

Hong Kong’s Centre for Food Safety will “closely monitor the latest situation in Cambodia, and maintain close contact with major local egg importers, distributors and supermarkets,” a government news website says.

“Hong Kong does not import live poultry or poultry meat from Cambodia, but 170,000 poultry eggs were imported from there last year,” the site says.

How long the ban would last depended on the status of the virus in Cambodia, an employee at Hong Kong’s Centre for Food Safety said.

Sonny Krishnan, communications officer for the World Health Organization in Cambodia, said yesterday that the ban was “understandable” but probably unnecessary, since Cambodia’s egg exports came from commercial farms and not the “backyard” sources of the outbreak.

To contact the reporter on this story: Justine Drennan at [email protected]