Brazil, the world's largest chicken exporter, confirmed its first outbreak of highly pathogenic avian influenza, commonly called bird flu, on a poultry farm earlier this month, prompting bans from several major importers. Bird flu has led to the culling of hundreds of millions of poultry around the globe in the past years and affected a large number of mammals, including more than a thousand dairy cows in the United States, raising concerns it could mutate into a form transmissible between humans. The cattle industry is not very big in the region and Brazil mainly breeds cows for meat, not dairy, which has proven to be more vulnerable to the virus, Mota said. "We don't want to raise the concerns where we don't have a problem," he added. Strong biosecurity in the past two decades and concentration along the production chain were the main reasons why Brazil did not report any bird flu outbreak on a farm before, he said.