Chinese businesses from rural poultry farms to the luxury Shanghai Four Seasons hotel are beginning to feel the impact of a bird flu outbreak that has killed nine people.
Taobao Marketplace, the ecommerce platform of the Alibaba internet group, confirmed that as of Wednesday it had banned online trading of live poultry in the Shanghai region.
The Four Seasons was among several upmarket Shanghai hotels to take chicken off the menu. Some international schools in the city have removed eggs and poultry from their cafés and started doing temperature checks on people entering their campuses. And KFC, one of China’s most successful foreign restaurant chains, has seen a fall in sales.