Dominic Lawson: Bernard Matthews, a heroic figure laid low by snobbery, hysteria and ignorance

If the NHS were able to achieve a similar standard of hygiene in its hospitals, we'd all be better off

In a sane country, Bernard Matthews would be a hero. Sixty years ago, as a teenager, he bought a basket of turkey eggs from a market stall in his native Norfolk, borrowed a paraffin-powered incubator, and sold the eventual results, after a bit of fattening up, for £9. He's been doing pretty much the same thing since, on an ever-larger scale: now his eponymous company turns over £400m a year of turkeys in various shapes and cuts, employing 5,000 people in depopulated East Anglia.

So impressed was Nikita Krushchev by the Bernard Matthews story that the then general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union asked him to help the USSR transform its poultry industry. Yet Matthews is written off by the British red-top press as "Bird-flu Bernie", while the more middle-class newspapers sneer that his mass production approach to husbandry - "cheap food for the proles" - made inevitable the sort of infection which temporarily closed down his Suffolk factory.

It's understandable that the promoters of less intensive farming methods should make this point to journalists - apart from anything else, they stand to gain from any collapse in Bernard Matthews' sales; but the facts about the H5N1 virus don't fit their argument.

The countries where the virus is endemic, such as Indonesia, Vietnam and Nigeria, are ones in which poultry is kept by individuals rather than by corporations: good old subsistence farming. According to Indonesia's chief vet, 80 per cent of households in her country keep poultry, and bird flu is rife in 30 of the nation's 33 provinces; but in a country where 3,000 a year die from dengue fever, it's not easy to persuade homes that the risk of keeping sick poultry is one they can't live with.

Compare that with the images from the Matthews operation that we have seen on our television screens over the past week: if the NHS was able to achieve a similar standard of hygiene in its hospitals we would all be much better off. A reporter who interviewed Bernard Matthews employees in Suffolk last week found that their main complaint about the operation was the rigour of the medical assessments. Two workers said that they had been required to remove rotten teeth before they were taken on.

It seems most likely that the virus stemmed from Hungarian-imported turkey, but the firm insists, and the British government accepts, that these imports came from outside the exclusion zone marking an earlier Hungarian outbreak. The most important question is how the virus got to Hungary. Nobody knows the answer to that yet, but my - uneducated - guess is that it's much more likely to have stemmed from peasant farming methods than a Bernard Matthews-style operation.

Whoever is ultimately responsible, the scale of this "health scare" is out of all proportion to its significance. As soon as any British farm reports an unexpected death in the flock, the professional scaremongers (who seem to include the entire British media) cite the case of BSE. They remind us of the way in which the Tory government downplayed the risk to humans from Bovine Spongiform Encephalitis, only to backtrack humiliatingly when the human form of the disease, so-called "new-variant CJD", began to kill young people in a peculiarly horrible way.

The last Tory health secretary, Stephen Dorrell, felt obliged to declare that up to 500,000 Britons could suffer this ghastly fate. A Leeds-based professor of microbiology, Richard Lacey, who achieved a certain celebrity at the time, spoke of "millions" of deaths - and he was not the only one.

What, actually, has transpired? The total of new-variant CJD fatalities to date is less than 150, and the amount of deaths attributed to the condition is declining year by year. There is now a body of medical opinion which asserts that the amount of fatalities has been so far below what we might expect from a food-borne source of infection that it is very doubtful if new-variant CJD has anything to do with BSE in cattle.

This is not an argument in favour of bone-headed farmers continuing to feed bone-meal to their ruminants; that had dreadful consequences - but not for human health. It is an argument in favour of remaining profoundly sceptical about the risk to humans from the H5N1 virus. This avian flu strain, by the way, was first discovered in Scotland as long ago as 1959.

The form which now concerns us has been rife in the Far East for at least a decade, possibly a generation. Given the scale of the human population there, and the insanitary conditions that prevail, it is significant that there has not been a human pandemic - and the longer such a pandemic fails to materialise, the more significant that fact becomes. It tells us that either the H5N1 virus has mutated in a way which is not especially harmful to humans, or that it is not suited to such mutation at all; and despite what you might read, there has been not a single proven example of infection from human to human.

If you are especially perverse - or indeed perverted - you can catch nasty infections from birds. A few years ago I contracted psittacosis as a result of inhaling the droppings of infected pigeons. This was the result of my organic-obsessed wife insisting that we should not use chemical fertiliser on our vegetable garden, but instead something more "natural". That's how you get from pigeon shit to pneumonia.

I am encouraged by the way in which the Environment Secretary, David Miliband, has refused to pander to the health hysterics in the wake of the Suffolk turkey H5N1 outbreak. He will thus be ignoring such headlines as: "If bird flu grips the nation, doctors will need guns" (copyright, The Sunday Times).While it is absolutely not Mr Miliband's brief to look after the interests of the British farming industry, he will be aware of the quite unnecessary costs still being imposed on our food producers as a result of BSE.

This was summed up rather cleverly by the BBC's business editor, Robert Peston, who reported this week that Britain's most celebrated haggis manufacturer, Macsween, now feels obliged to use ox viscera from Uruguay, as it is prohibited from buying its essential ingredient from any country where there had been even a suspicion of a BSE outbreak. I repeat: had been. The fact that the British herd is now free of BSE is a fact which the authorities in Brussels and London regard as irrelevant.

No wonder the recent snatched newspaper photographs of Bernard Matthews show a man gaunt and stooped with worry. My hope for him is that British consumers have finally realised just how much their emotions have been manipulated by the merchants of the "worst case scenario" and decide to use their own common sense.

d.lawson@indpendent.co.uk