Bird Flu - Avian Influenza - news - information

Thursday, September 27, 2007

Bird flu strain found on Saskatchewan farm

WINNIPEG, Manitoba (Reuters) - Canadian veterinary officials said on Thursday they found the H7N3 strain of avian influenza on a Saskatchewan chicken farm, but noted the virus was not the deadly strain that scientists fear could cause the next flu pandemic.

“We are not dealing with the H5N1 virus that has been linked to human illness in Asia and other parts of the world,” said Sandra Stephens, a veterinarian with the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.

The H7N3 strain is not normally associated with human illness, the CFIA said.

The finding had little impact on livestock and grain markets. Most Canadian poultry is produced for the domestic market, and Saskatchewan, known for its large expanses of grain fields, accounts for only a small fraction of the output.

“It is a mild strain. It doesn’t appear to be a big deal,” said Paul Aho, an industry consultant with Poultry Perspective.

Canada informed the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) about the case, as well as the United States and European Union, which import some Canadian poultry products.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture said it would ban shipments of poultry from Saskatchewan, although it has not imported poultry from the province since 2005.

“We will continue to monitor the situation closely,” said John Clifford, the USDA’s chief veterinarian.

The H7N3 strain is routinely found in a low-pathogenic form in wild ducks in North America, said Jim Clark, a senior official with the CFIA. The disease can quickly mutate into a high-pathogenic form in commercial poultry flocks, he said.

“There is a vast and total difference between an H5 and an H7 subtype,” Clark said in an interview.

The CFIA quarantined the farm, located northwest of the provincial capital of Regina, and will destroy its flock of 45,000 chickens.

Bird flu story source: Reuters

Tuesday, September 18, 2007

China confirms bird flu outbreak

BEIJING (Reuters) - China has confirmed an outbreak of the H5N1 bird flu virus among ducks in an outlying district of the southern city of Guangzhou.

The ministry said on its Web site (http://www.agri.gov.cn) late on Monday that 36,130 ducks had been culled following the outbreak in Guangzhou’s Panyu District.

“At present, the epidemic has been bought under effective control,” it said.

The strain was confirmed as a subtype of the H5N1 strain by the National Avian Influenza Reference Laboratory, the ministry added.

There have been no other reports of outbreaks in the nearby area, it said.

In Hong Kong, the South China Morning Post quoted a Guangzhou official as saying more than 100,000 birds were to be destroyed in the next few days to prevent bird flu from spreading.

“We would rather kill 100,000 ducks wrongfully than miss even one (that has the virus),” Su Zequn, vice mayor of Panyu county’s Sizian village, told the newspaper.

It also quoted Yu Yedong, the director of the Guangdong Animal Vaccination Center as saying that although almost all poultry in the province had been vaccinated, it took at least 21 days for vaccines to create enough antibodies in birds.

On Monday, Hong Kong suspended chilled and frozen duck and geese imports from Guangdong province following China’s announcement that that poultry there was suspected to be infected with H5N1.

Bird flu story source: Reuters

Saturday, September 08, 2007

German Authorities Order 200,000 Birds Slaughtered Over Suspected Bird Flu Infection

MUNICH, Germany (AP)—German authorities said Friday that more than 200,000 ducks would be slaughtered at two farms in Bavaria after tests indicated the presence of the H5N1 strain of bird flu.

The head of Bavaria’s state office for health and food safety, Volker Hingst, said the slaughter was “a purely precautionary measure,” taken after “laboratory indications of H5N1” were found. The birds were not visibly sick, he said.

The two farms are located near Schwandorf, east of Nuremberg, and have a total of 205,000 ducks. It was not immediately clear how the virus might have gotten there.

Last month, more than 160,000 ducks were slaughtered at another Bavarian poultry farm following an outbreak of the disease. Officials have said that contaminated straw was the likely source in that case.

The two businesses affected Friday are subsidiaries of that farm, authorities said.

The H5N1 virus has killed more than 190 people worldwide, according to the World Health Organization.

The disease is hard for humans to catch, but experts fear it could mutate into a form that spreads easily between people, potentially sparking a global pandemic. To date, most human cases have been traced to contact with infected birds.

Bird flu story source: AP

Friday, September 07, 2007

More Bird Flu in Burma’s Mon Province

BANGKOK—A United Nations official has confirmed a fresh outbreak of avian influenza in the southern state of Mon, which borders Thailand in the south of the country.

An adviser to the Burmese government with the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) told RFA’s Burmese service: “We have had an outbreak in Mon state. Five hundred chickens were culled, but it is now under control.”

The deadly H5N1 virus hit poultry in the Dawn Zayat quarter of Maulmein township, sources in the region said.

A second outbreak was also reported in Pa-An township in neighboring Karen State.

This time, the outbreak is different from the previous wave in Mandalay, where it happened in many farms at the same time.

Outbreak said under control

A veterinary team from the FAO’s office in the former capital Rangoon had left together with Burmese livestock officials for the area to carry out a cull of poultry.

“Bird flu can spread in three ways—through the movement of poultry and its products, through caged birds and the wild bird trade, and through the migration of wild birds,” Rangoon-based FAO expert Aung Khin said.

“But [in Burma] most cases are from the movement of poultry and its products.”

Burma’s secretive military regime has confirmed the outbreak in Maulmein, but so far no official announcement has been made regarding the Karen state outbreak.

There have been two outbreaks of bird flu in Mon state already this summer, which lies about 300 kms (180 miles) south of Rangoon.

Authorities in the central Burmese region of Bago announced an outbreak of H5N1 among poultry in early August, which started among backyard chicken and ducks, experts said.

Thousands of birds were culled in Letpandan township in an attempt to contain that outbreak, which was later confirmed as bird flu.

Agricultural teams were having trouble disposing of infected carcases during the rainy season, they said.

“Since it is rainy season here, we are facing a lot of trouble in burying or destroying the animals. When we dig the ground to bury them, all the water comes out and the cost of fuel is too high to burn them, but we are doing our best,” he told reporter Khin Maung Soe.

Burmese authorities culled 660,000 birds last year to contain the spread of the deadly virus, which has ripped through Asian poultry flocks since 2003 and caused 319 cases in humans, 192 of which were fatal.

Bird flu story source: Radio Free Asia

Thursday, September 06, 2007

Indonesia reports 85th bird flu death

JAKARTA (AFP) — A 33-year-old Indonesian man from Sumatra island died of bird flu on Thursday, bringing the death toll in the world’s worst-affected nation to 85 and the global toll to 200, health officials said.

The plantation worker died at 2:00 pm (0700 GMT), the doctor treating him at the state general hospital in the city of Pekanbaru, Azizman Daad, told AFP.

A health ministry official earlier confirmed that the man was infected with the deadly H5N1 virus, after two tests came back positive.

The archipelago nation has now reported 106 cases overall, including the 85 deaths.

Daad said it was not clear whether the man had come into contact with infected poultry, but he had bought two live chickens at a local market.

The patient was taken to hospital in Pekanbaru on Saturday and transferred on Monday to the general state hospital, the facility designated by the government to treat bird flu patients in the region.

Separately, two children and an adult on the island of Bali were being treated as suspected carriers of the virus, said Putu Andrika, from the bird flu team at Sanglah general hospital in the capital Denpasar.

“They are not in critical condition,” Andrika said.

Tests were being carried out to confirm whether they were infected, he added.

Bird flu story source: AFP

Wednesday, September 05, 2007

Government Watchdog Reports Bird Flu Outbreak in Krasnodar ( Russia )

A government watchdog on Tuesday reported the third outbreak this year of the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu after 410 birds died on a poultry farm in the Krasnodar region, but the growing poultry sector is set to withstand the scare.

Another 414 birds were culled and strict quarantine measures were put in place at the farm in the Black Sea region after local laboratory tests confirmed the presence of the virus in dead birds, the Agriculture Ministry’s Federal Service for Veterinarian and Vegetation Sanitary Supervision said.

“It’s serious enough to bring in strict measures, including quarantine, to make sure it does not spread,” watchdog spokesman Alexei Alexeyenko said. “An investigation is being carried out to determine the source of the infection.”

The highly pathogenic H5N1 strain was responsible for the deaths of birds at the Lebyazhye-Chepiginskoye farm, in the same region where the virus was detected in dead domestic birds in January.

The second outbreak this year occurred in February, when several cases in towns around Moscow were traced to the city’s best-known pet market.

The country expects to boost poultry meat output 16 percent this year to about 1.8 million tons, cutting the share of imports in domestic consumption. Domestic poultry producers last year supplied about 53 percent of the country’s consumption.

Dmitry Rylko, general director of the Institute for Agricultural Market Studies, said the size of the country and its quick reaction to bird flu cases offered commercial poultry farmers protection against bird flu.

“Such cases will be repeated from time to time in various regions of the world, including Russia,” he said.

“In Russia, large-scale commercial farming is quite well protected against it due to good quarantine measures and the very low density of the poultry population, even in the south.”

Bird flu story source: Moscow Times

Saturday, September 01, 2007

WHO confirms five human bird flu cases in Vietnam

HANOI (Reuters) - The World Health Organization (WHO) has confirmed five human bird flu cases in Vietnam, four of them fatal, the U.N. agency said in a statement.

The four, including two women, died between June 21 and August 3 while a fifth person, a 29-year-old man, had recovered, it said.

All five cases, which had been confirmed earlier by Vietnam-based laboratory tests, were from the country’s north. They brought the total human infections in the Southeast Asian country since 2003 to 100 with 46 fatalities.

Three of Vietnam’s 64 provinces—two in the southern Mekong delta and one in the north—are still on the government’s current bird flu watchlist, the Agriculture Ministry said on Friday.

Bird flu story source: Reuters