The leader of Hong Kong's main opposition Democratic Party, Martin Lee, has said the government has shown through its recent handling of the bird flu crisis that it is incapable of handling emergencies. Government workers last week announced the slaughter of the Territory's one-and-a-quarter million chickens in an effort to stop the spread of the flu, first found in poultry but which has now infected sixteen people. But government officials have admitted the operation has been problematic. From Hong Kong, Jill McGivering reports:

Mr Lee criticized Hong Kong's chief executive, Tung Chi Wua, for not taking a more prominent role in the present crisis and accused the government of suppressing information in an attempt to hide the scale of the problem. Even now, said Mr Lee, the government was under-estimating the threat posed by the new strain of flu:

"From all statements coming from government officials, they seem to be happy that now the worry's over. So this high degree of complacency is extremely dangerous, and also when you look back the whole way of the government's handling of the matter would suggest in the beginning they tried to suppress it and tried to play it down, saying that there's no problem, and then of course they got panicky."

The Democratic Party's spokesman on Health warned that the slaughter of poultry shouldn't be seen as the end of the crisis. As Hong Kong approached its peak flu season, he said, there was a real danger of the bird flu virus coming into contact with more common types of flu, leading to the possible emergence of a "super-bug" which could pass easily from one person to another.

He called on the Department of Health to make contingency plans for a possible second wave of infection. The Democrats' attack comes as the government is trying to appease poultry workers, whose livelihoods have been disrupted by the mass slaughter.