It is all too easy to scapegoat wild birds for a potential bird (human) flu pandemic. Let's look where the real problem lies.

It is, as Elizabeth Taylor (Letters, March 20) says, with the 900 million birds bred and slaughtered in the UK each year, whose many tonnes of waste is dumped on fields.

I noted Animal Welfare Minister Ben Bradshaw, in trying to calm the public fear over bird flu on Radio 4 (February 19), said, and I quote him verbatim: "We had a terrible time with Foot and Mouth. We have been very successful with avian flu. People need to remember this is a very different disease to Foot and Mouth.

"It's not spread by air, so it's easier to contain. You can only catch it from the faeces of birds. We are confident but not complacent.

"We think the poultry industry is very well prepared and has extremely high levels of biosecurity and it knows what to do in the case of an outbreak."

How can poultry farmers have "extremely high levels of biosecurity" when, all over Britain, the waste from factory farmed birds is being dumped on fields?

Equally dotty is that in February the UK was successful in getting EU partners to ease restrictions and allow commercially-farmed poultry and game birds to be moved out of an infected bird flu area up to 15 days after an outbreak (The Times, March 3).

To this sane, logical person these two practices would seem a way of making sure that bird flu really does take off and cause untold misery to birds and perhaps humans, too.

-Sara Starkey, Tonbridge, Kent