South Korea has started culling thousands of chickens after an outbreak of bird flu was confirmed to be the H5N1 strain, officials said yesterday.
To determine the origin of the virus, officials were taking blood samples from the chickens, migratory birds and foreign workers at the infected farm in Gimje, 260km south of Seoul.
Japan, Taiwan and Hong Kong suspended imports of uncooked chicken from South Korea but exports of cooked birds will not be affected, the agriculture ministry said.
The ministry said 270,000 chickens at five farms, the affected one and four others within a 500m radius, will be culled and buried along with all eggs in the area.
“The culling of chickens is underway,” said Kim Chang-seob, chief veterinary officer of the ministry.
Another official said yesterday that more than 100,000 chickens had already been destroyed.
The ministry has also imposed restrictions on the movement of chickens and ducks within a 10km radius.
Kim noted that all outbreaks in the past occurred in the winter months from November to last month but the current case erupted in early spring.
This makes health authorities suspect the virus might have been transmitted either by migrating birds or foreign workers who recently came from Mongolia, Vietnam and China where avian flu outbreaks have been reported, he said.
“The infected farm hires 11 foreign workers who came from Mongolia, Vietnam and China ... we are taking their blood samples,” Kim said.
About 2,400 chickens out of about 150,000 birds on the farm died between Saturday and Tuesday. The owner began reporting the deaths to health authorities on Monday.
Authorities immediately sealed off the location and barred any shipment of chickens or eggs to and from the farm, as well as to 12 other nearby farms.
The last time a virulent strain was reported in South Korea was in March last year.
South Korea reported seven cases of infection by the H5N1 strain of bird flu between November 2006 and March last year, resulting in the temporary suspension of poultry exports to Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan and elsewhere.
But last June the World Organization for Animal Health classified the country free from the disease after no new outbreaks were reported for three months.
The H5N1 strain of bird flu has killed more than 230 people worldwide since late 2003. No South Koreans have contracted the disease.
Experts fear the virus, which is usually spread directly from birds to humans, could mutate into a form easily transmissible between people and spark a global pandemic.
The WHO said on Thursday that at least three brothers in Pakistan were infected with the bird flu virus last year, and some human-to-human spread likely occurred.
But the UN agency said the disease had not gone beyond the family cluster near Peshawar, suggesting “limited human to human transmission.”
“This outbreak did not extend into the community and appropriate steps were taken to reduce future risks of human infections,” it said in a statement.
Similar clusters of H5N1 bird flu virus within families have been previously detected in Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam.
The WHO had earlier confirmed only one human H5N1 infection in Pakistan — a 25-year-old man who died in late November. On Thursday, it said international laboratory tests have now confirmed that two of that man’s brothers also had the disease.
One of those two brothers — who both fully recovered — was a veterinarian involved in culling infected poultry, whose symptoms began in late October, making him the first or “index case” of the bird flu cluster.
None of the veterinarian’s brothers had any direct contact with sick or dead poultry, the WHO said.
But it said a fourth brother, who also died in mid-November after having close contact with the sick veterinarian, was considered a “probable” case.
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